Government lawyers have told a watchdog group suing over the Internal Revenue Service scandal that Lois Lerner’s emails aren’t missing after all.
Attorneys for the Justice Department surprised Judicial Watch, a right-leaning watchdog group, on Friday by saying that they have copies of every electronic message ever sent from Lerner, a former top IRS official who is a key figure in a targeting scandal involving conservative groups that sought tax-exempt status.
The IRS told Congress that thousands of Lerner’s emails sent prior to 2011 were hopelessly lost thanks to a hard drive crash that left the data unrecoverable. A back-up system, they said, had also been erased. Officials told Congress about a half dozen IRS officials in addition to Lerner, some affiliated with the targeting, had also lost emails due to computer crashes.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said Justice Department lawyers informed him that the federal government keeps a back-up copy of every email and record in the event of a government-wide catastrophe.
The back-up system includes the IRS emails, too.
“So, the emails may be inconvenient to access, but they are not gone with the [broken] hard drive,” Judicial Watch spokeswoman Jill Farrell told the Washington Examiner.
Judicial Watch is now seeking the release of the emails, which Justice Department lawyers say would be hard to find because of the significant size of the backup system.
NORM ‘n’ AL Note: Can you imagine what it might be like to go into court with a defense like, “Well, gosh, Judge, that back-up system our government’s got is just HUGE! No way we can find those emails Lois sent! It’ll just take FOREVER….” If there has ever been a time when the Obama administration has NOT been lying to the American public, trying to tell all of us what it thinks we want (or need) to hear, we would like to know when that time might have been. If you were one of those who voted for our Liar-in-Chief, you should be furious and fuming by now!
House lawmakers in May voted to hold Lerner in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify about accusations that she helped to orchestrate a targeting scheme against right-leaning and Tea Party groups applying for 501(c)(4) status.
House Republicans investigating the matter subpoenaed Lerner’s records and emails, but learned from the IRS in June that it had lost most of the emails she sent before 2011 because of the computer crash.
According to Fitton, the attorneys told him the backup system would be “too onerous to search,” but acknowledged that Treasury Department inspectors were investigating it.
“This is a jaw-dropping revelation,” Fitton said in a statement. “The Obama administration had been lying to the American people all along about Lois Lerner’s missing emails.”
Justice Department officials have not yet responded to a request for comment by the Examiner.
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.
We are going to raise this new development with Judge Sullivan, who is increasingly losing patience with the Obama administration’s gamesmanship. In fact, this latest discovery was precipitated by Judge Sullivan’s independent inquiry into the administration’s bogus claims that the data was unrecoverable.
The Justice Department is putting out anonymous statements saying we “misheard” what its lawyers said and that this is not new information about a back-up system. We didn’t mishear anything and we have no doubt that the back-up system as described exists. But the existence of any back-up system was withheld from the court despite two orders (order 1, order 2) demanding specifically sworn declarations about where Lerner’s emails may be residing and effort to obtain them. We asked if the IRS and DOJ would amend the sworn declarations and finally inform Judge Sullivan directly about this back up system. The answer, repeatedly, has been “no.” Talk about stonewalling!
[by Susan Ferrechio, writing for The Washington Examiner]
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NORM ‘n’ AL, Minneapolis
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