It’s a real life miracle! Remember when IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told Congress there was no way that Lois Lerner’s “lost” emails could be retrieved? And we all know how much Koskinen wanted to get to the bottom of the scandal surrounding the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups.
The Hill is reporting today that the Treasury Department Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) announced he found 6,400 of those impossible-to-retrieve emails.
The TIGTA is in the process of turning the electronic messages over to the Senate Finance Committee, which is investigating the possibility of abuse, which may have helped Barack Obama win reelection. According to a committee spokesman, “These emails will be carefully examined as part of the committee’s bipartisan IRS investigation.”
Because the inspector general is still turning over the emails to the committee, staffers could not comment on their contents, but one source familiar with the investigation said the emails were from 2004 through 2013, with the bulk coming from 2012. About 650 are from 2010 and 2011, when the alleged IRS targeting began.
Jenny Beth Martin, head of the Tea Party Patriots released the following statement:
The latest information from the Treasury Inspector General indicates that from the very beginning, the IRS was attempting to cover its tracks throughout the targeting of Tea Party and other conservative groups.
This is another in a long line of deplorable actions from the Internal Revenue Service against groups who were merely trying to hold their government accountable. It will be very enlightening to see the content of the emails as TIGTA continues the investigation.
No doubt there will be even more egregious revelations, as we have sadly come to expect from the IRS under the Obama Administration.
They’ve said they did nothing wrong. They’ve said it was ‘rogue agents’ in the Cincinnati field office. They’ve said the emails were lost forever.
I wouldn’t believe John Koskinen or Lois Lerner if they told me the sky was blue.
As for Koskinen, he had the agency release a statement saying the IRS was happy the TIGTA found the emails he swore up and down would never be found:
In a statement, the IRS said it was glad to hear that the inspector general found the new Lerner emails, calling it “an encouraging development that will help resolve remaining questions and dispel uncertainty surrounding the emails.”
The agency also noted that it took the inspector general around 10 months to come up with the 650 emails sent or received during the period affected by Lerner’s hard-drive crash, and that the IRS itself handed over 24,000 emails from that period last year.
“The IRS will continue to cooperate with the Inspector General and the congressional committees to complete work in this area, and we look forward to the results to determine what additional steps the IRS can take to ensure that we continue to improve our processes,” the agency said.
Cross-posted at The Lid
