Emails from the federal bureaucrat at the heart of the IRS corruption scandal do exist, according to government lawyers and the watchdog group Judicial Watch.
The revelation, which runs directly contrary to almost a year of testimony from Obama administration officials and other IRS officials, emerged Monday as a result of Judicial Watch’s work to uncover evidence related to the tax agency’s discrimination against President Obama’s political opponents.
“Department of Justice attorneys for the Internal Revenue Service told Judicial Watch on Friday that Lois Lerner’s emails, indeed all government computer records, are backed up by the federal government in case of a government-wide catastrophe,” the Washington, D.C.-based group said in a press release Monday.
“The Obama administration attorneys said that this back-up system would be too onerous to search,” the group said. “The DOJ attorneys also acknowledged that the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) is investigating this back-up system.”
“We obviously disagree that disclosing the emails as required would be onerous, and plan to raise this new development with Judge Sullivan,” the group said. “This is a jaw-dropping revelation.”
Lerner, the highest ranking IRS official implicated in the corruption scandal to date, previously plead the 5th Amendment — but not before saying she was completely innocent. The emails, if they can be obtained, may further implicate Lerner and tie the targeting of conservative groups directly to the White House.
Also Monday, another startling revelation involving Lerner: According to reports from the New York Observer, the IRS destroyed Lerner’s Blackberry cell phone AFTER the Congressional inquiry began.
In February, President Obama infamously told FOX News’ Bill O’Reilly there wasn’t a “smidgen of corruption” at the IRS.
<span class="dsq-postid" data-dsqidentifier="8800 http://www.themainewire.com/?p=8800">13 Comments
I think Lois looks tremendous in orange,
Someone should tell the Republicans in Congress. They are acting like idiots in the hearings. They are trying to push the IRS Commissioner to say that they withheld info. The process that the IRS followed to recover a substantial portion of the lost emails is exactly ‘by the book’ for data recovery. For the time period that was missing, they went to potential senders and recipients of Lerner eMail and got the eMails from them. That is an excellent recovery process. So it’s anyone’s guess why the GOP is going psycho in the hearings. Thank goodness that doesn’t happen here in Maine …. nyuck, nyuck, nyuck
Now that it appears that what many of us have known all along, that Lois Lerner and other IRS officials are bald faced liars, when are indictments going to be handed down? Lerner and others, including the current IRS commissioner, need to go to jail.
Of course they still exist, and they exist on more than one backup system. I know the backup procedures the government and the military uses, and I know there is an easy way to create a query to extract every file that has her name, email address, or IP address attached to them. They could have all the emails she’s ever sent over the IRS system in less than a couple hours. But, they are in full cover-up mode because the president has his fingerprints all over this scandal.
Once again, Obama makes a statement and it is taken at face value as a positive – just like “hope and change” and “fundamentally transforming” our nation. He said that there wasn’t a “smidgen of corruption” at the IRS. What he he meant was, no, there is not a smidgen, but instead there is a superabundance of corruption, deep into and widespread across the organization. Every word from this man must be parsed, both truth and lies.
jooouli
jooouli
you will love it
don’t regret it
Lois Lerner’s emails DO exist
don’t regret it
don’t regret it
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