IRS unable to produce emails to Congress

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the IRS to explain under oath how it lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency's tea party controversy.
U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan gave the tax agency a month to submit the explanation in writing. Sullivan said he is also appointing a federal magistrate to see whether the lost emails can be obtained from other sources.

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Sullivan said the sworn IRS statement should include information about the inspector general's concerns.
Sullivan said he would assign federal magistrate John Facciola to look into ways of obtaining the IRS records from other sources, though it is unclear how much information could be recovered.

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Ms. Lerner asked another official whether messages sent over the instant-messaging system were recorded. When she was told that they were not, she responded, “Perfect.”

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Mr. Koskinen said that he had not been aware of the messaging system until recently and had never used it himself. He also said that the disclosure of the system was delayed because of the volume of documents requested by Congress, not because the agency was trying to obstruct the investigations.

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crimsonaudio said:

"Sorry, the NSA lost those files, too! What are the chances?"

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The panel approved a resolution Wednesday authored by Rep. Steve Stockman, R-Texas, that directs the Secretary of Defense to send the House of Representatives "copies of any electronic communication in the possession of the Secretary, the Director of the National Security Agency, or any office that reports to the Secretary or the Director that was transmitted to or from any electronic mail account(s) used by former Internal Revenue Service Exempt Organizations Division Director Lois Lerner at any time between January 1, 2009, and April 30, 2011."

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Ordering the destruction of a hard drive and documenting that process would be handled by trained, certified IT asset managers, according to IAITAM. But the group’s records show that at least three IRS IT asset managers were shuffled out of their positions around the time of the May 2013 inspector general’s report that detailed the agency’s targeting practices.

IAITAM said investigators need to “determine if these in-house IT asset managers were removed from the picture as the IRS email investigation heated up.”

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Kane told Oversight staffers last week that the backup tapes that held two years of lost Lerner emails may actually still exist.



The transcript also revealed that, according to Kane, additional IRS officials related to the targeting of conservative groups suffered computer crashes that destroyed emails that investigators are seeking.

Among those who lost data are Justin Low, a technical advisor and tax law specialist for the agency’s tax exempt division, which oversees decisions to grant tax exempt status.

Other employees who lost data were David Fish, an advisor to Lerner who also develops guidance for tax exempt groups and served as acting director of Rulings and Agreements and Andy Megosh, a manager in the IRS exempt organizations division.

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On Tuesday, Camp’s release reported that his investigators had learned that experts informed agency officials that Lerner’s hard drive “was ‘scratched,’ but data was recoverable.” He suggested that this information contradicts an IRS court filing from last week describing the data as “unrecoverable.” Camp also alleged that the IRS – which has an extremely advanced computer forensics program of its own – “refused to utilize outside experts to recover the data,” raising “more questions about potential criminal wrong doing at the IRS.”

The release notes ominously that “It is unknown whether the scratch was accidental or deliberate” – a neat little way of using a bland statement of empirical fact to insinuate criminal wrongdoing.

Additionally, committee investigators going through the IRS’s internal IT tracking system apparently found one reference to Lerner’s hard drive as being “recovered.” IRS employees, the release said, “were unable to confirm the accuracy of the documents or the meaning of the entry.

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Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen told the House Oversight Committee Wednesday that investigators are looking at "backup tapes" that could hold emails from ex-agency official Lois Lerner.



Koskinen, referring to the tapes, said that he does not know "how they found them" or "whether there's anything on them or not."

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Lois Lerner used to head the IRS division that handles applications for tax-exempt status. In a series of emails with a colleague in November 2012, Lerner made two disparaging remarks about members of the GOP, including one remark that was profane.

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