Five months after ex-IRS official Lois Lerner's lost emails revived the investigation into the matter of abuse by Internal Revenue Service officials in unfairly and illegally targeting conservative leaning and Tea Party not-for-profit group, as many as 30,000 of Lerner's missing emails have been recovered by the IRS inspector general, The Washington Examiner reported.
On Friday, the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration informed congressional staffers from several committees that the missing emails had been found among hundreds of "disaster recovery tapes" used to back up the IRS email system. Now this will surely provide House Republicans with the chance to examine Lerner's precise role in the IRS targeting scandal.
"They just said it took them several weeks and some forensic effort to get these emails off these tapes," a congressional aide told the Washington Examiner.
Learner, who headed the IRS division, has been accused of processing Tea Party and conservative groups' for tax exempt status in an unfair manner before the 2010 and 2012 elections, including the IRS who improperly delayed dozens of applications for years, according to an internal audit by the agency's inspector general. Documents show that some liberal groups were singled out, too, Politico reported.
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 two years' worth of her emails from 2009 through 2011. The fact that they made no mention of this after promising to turn over the documents for two months cast had committee investigators crying foul, especially after it was revealed that, as a matter of Federal law, the agency was required to and has maintained a contract with an outside company, Sonasoft, for the sole purpose of backing up the email files. As a result of what many on Capitol Hill believe to be a convenient stall and cover up tactic, outspoken conservative Senator Ted Cruz (Republican, Texas) called for the Justice Department to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the matter further.
Apart from Lerner, the IRS also lost the emails of several other employees who worked under Lerner during that period.
Until June, the tax agency was still claiming that Lerner's hard drive had been recycled and presumably destroyed after the computer crash in 2011. But now, the TIGTA has found many of those emails and are reportedly working to recover them fully, a GOP who spoke with TIGTA was told.
Out of the 744 disaster recovery tapes, about 250 million emails need to be reviewed. It will apparently take a few weeks before the emails get pulled out, redacted appropriately and otherwise ready to be presented to members of Congress, TheBlaze reported.
On late Friday, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) stated that his committee was ready to analyze and examine the recovered emails.
"Though it is unclear whether TIGTA has found all of the missing Lois Lerner emails, there may be significant information in this discovery," he said. "The Oversight Committee will be looking for information about her mindset and who she was communicating with outside the IRS during a critical period of time when the IRS was targeting conservative groups."
But Issa also criticized the IRS for failing to come up with the emails itself. "This discovery also underscores the lack of cooperation Congress has received from the IRS," Issa said. "The agency first failed to disclose the loss to Congress and then tried to declare Lerner's emails gone and lost forever. Once again it appears the IRS hasn't been straight with Congress and the American people."
Meanwhile, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen is fully cooperating with the investigation, the IRS said in a statement to the Examiner.
"As Commissioner Koskinen has stated, the IRS welcomes TIGTA's independent review and expert forensic analysis," the statement said. "Commissioner Koskinen has said for some time he would be pleased if additional Lois Lerner emails from this time frame could be found."