In a stunning revelation, the president of the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch told FNC's Shannon Bream on Monday that tens of thousands of long-missing emails belonging to former IRS official Lois Lerner have been safely backed up all this time and still exist, Fox News reported. The messages were claimed by the Obama administration to have been lost in a 2011 computer crash.
During a phone call with Department of Justice attorneys, representing the IRS in Judicial Watch's FOIA lawsuit against the IRS, on Friday, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton learned of the bombshell news from an attorney who works in Attorney General Eric Holder's Justice Department.
Appearing on FNC's The Real Story with Gretchen Carlson, Fitton, whose group is suing the IRS over its failure to provide the records to Congress, claimed, "All the focus on missing hard drives has been a diversion," he said. "The Obama administration has known all along where the email records could be - but dishonestly withheld this information. You can bet we are going to ask the court for immediate assistance in cutting through this massive obstruction of justice."
"The Department of Justice attorney told the Judicial Watch attorney on Friday," Fitton said during a Monday afternoon Fox News broadcast, "that it turns out the federal government backs up all computer records in case something terrible happens in Washington and there is a catastrophe, so the government can continue operating."
The catch, he added, is that the DOJ attorney also claimed "it would be too hard to go and get Lois Lerner's emails from that backup system. So everything we've been hearing about scratched hard drives, about missing emails of Lois Lerner, [and] other IRS officials, other officials in the Obama administration, it's all been a pack of malarkey."
"They could get these records, but they don't want to. And they haven't told anyone about it, frankly, until we were able to get it out of them on Friday," Fitton told Fox News. "And there's no such thing as Lois Lerner's missing e-mails. It's all been a big lie. They've been lying to the courts, to the American people and to Congress."
The documents are key to a congressional investigation against Lerner, who has been accused of processing Tea Party and conservative groups' requests for tax exempt status in an unfair manner before the 2010 and 2012 elections. She has also twice asserted her Fifth Amendment right not to testify before Congress and has been held in contempt of Congress by the House. "Somebody in Lois Lerner's position has an executive assistant who has access to her email just as though she did," said Morgan Wright, a computer forensics expert. "So whatever email comes into Lois Lerner's box goes into her administrator's box as well."
Since the scandal broke in 2013, documents from various agencies and individuals have been requested by GOP-led House committees, with IRS claiming to have spent $10 million in compliance of such requests. But Lerner, who was placed on administrative leave shortly after the scandal broke, and has since retired, remained the focal suspicion of the controversy, repeatedly denying any illegal behavior.
Early in 2014, the IRS finally agreed to hand over all of Lerner's emails and set about collecting them, only to realize that many of them prior to April 2011 were missing. In a claim that strains all credulity, the agency stated to have discovered that Lerner's computer had crashed in mid-2011, wiping out most of her emails. The fact that they made no mention of this after promising to turn over the documents for two months had committee investigators crying foul.
In a separate claim, a senior IRS lawyer acknowledged in a sworn declaration that Lerner's Blackberry had intentionally been destroyed after Congress began its probe into IRS targeting of conservative groups in June 2012, after Lerner had already been summoned for questioning on reports of the IRS' targeting of conservative groups.
According to Fox News, Thomas Kane, Deputy Assistant Chief Counsel for the IRS, wrote in the declaration, part of a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch against the IRS, that the Blackberry was "removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012."
"We had already talked to her. Our personal staff and Oversight Committee staff had sat down with Ms. Lerner and confronted her about information we were getting from conservative groups in the state of Ohio and around the country," Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told Fox News.
"If you intentionally destroy evidence, that is a crime. If you make a statement in court saying the evidence is not available and it is, that is also a crime," said Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice.
Meanwhile, both IRS Commissioner John Koskinen and White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest have denied the existence of Lerner's emails, UK MailOnline reported. On July 20, Koskinen told a congressional panel that Lerner's hard drive "was recycled then destroyed' because 'it was determined that it was dysfunctional and that, with experts, no emails could be retrieved."
