Johnson asks how 80,000 'lost' Lerner emails were recovered by IRS watchdog

BY SARAH WESTWOOD |
FEBRUARY 10, 2015 | 5:26 PM


Lois Lerner emails obtained from the House Ways and Means Committee are displayed in Washington,...After the Internal Revenue Service’s inspector general recovered some 80,000 emails to and from former agency executive Lois Lerner, lawmakers began asking why the IRS had previously claimed most of those emails were permanently lost.

In a letter to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen Tuesday, Sen. Ron Johnson demanded details about the agency’s attempts to produce the emails before its watchdog, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, succeeded in doing so.

The Wisconsin Republican cited a November report from the Washington Examiner that revealed TIGTA’s discovery of an estimated 30,000 emails on disaster recovery tapes.

But TIGTA officials informed Johnson’s staff last week that it had ultimately extracted 80,000 from the tapes, raising questions about whether the IRS truly went to “great lengths” and made “extraordinary efforts” to find the lost emails, as Koskinen testified last year.
Johnson, who chairs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, also expressed concerns about a reported trove of 2,500 documents that could “show taxpayer information held by the Internal Revenue Service being shared with President Obama’s White House.” Johnson asked the IRS commissioner to demonstrate that his agency had given Congress all records of communications between IRS and White House officials.

The 80,000 emails will likely yield just 16,000 “unique” messages, with the rest being duplicates, according to the letter.

“While TIGTA still must compare these 16,000 emails to the emails already produced by the IRS, it is possible that a large number of these emails have not yet been produced to Congress,” Johnson said, pointing to a House Oversight Committee report that stated IRS officials had collected “less than 100” of Lerner’s emails to give to lawmakers.

The former director of the tax agency’s exempt organizations unit, Lerner left her IRS post amid allegations that she had participated in a scheme to subject conservative nonprofits to extra scrutiny. Her departure did little to slow a congressional probe into her activities, which included a request for email records from the time she led the office that decided tax-exempt status.

Koskinen informed lawmakers on the Hill in June 2014 that the agency had lost all of the emails Lerner sent or received between January 2009 and April 2011 due to complications from a computer crash. He said the disaster tapes could only store emails for a six-month period.

The announcement that thousands of emails from a key stretch of time in Lerner’s tenure had disappeared sparked outrage and skepticism among congressional Republicans last year.

Koskinen said the tax agency had waited to tell Congress about the missing emails for several months while it attempted to track them down, according to Johnson’s letter.

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