Inspector General Finds Lois Lerner Emails IRS Claimed Were too Difficult to Recover

Back in June, the Internal Revenue Service
released a
memo outlining the particulars of its search for email records
related to the congressional investigation into possible IRS
targeting of conservative nonprofit groups. To the extent that the
memo had a theme, it was that the IRS had engaged in spectacular,
one might even say heroic, effort to find and release the
emails.

The IRS, the memo explained, had “never before undertaken a
document production of this size and scope.” It took hundreds of
employees and over a hundred thousand man hours to complete. The
cost was well into the millions of dollars. Every effort had been
made.

In particular, the agency memo stressed, it had thoroughly
searched for emails from Lois Lerner, who during the time under
investigation was the head of the IRS tax exempt division and who
had become the key figure in the congressional inquiry.

That effort was hampered somewhat by the fact that Lerner had
suffered a hard drive crash in mid-2011 wiping records of much of
her email from the time period under investigation. Unfortunately,
the memo explained, “the data stored on her computer’s hard drive
was determined at the time to be ‘unrecoverable’ by the IT
professionals…Any of Ms. Lerner’s email that was only stored on
that computer’s hard drive would have been lost when the hard drive
crashed and could not be recovered.”

Nor were backups of those emails available. The IRS memo
explained that the agency took several steps to try to find those
emails. In particular, the agency “confirmed that back-up tapes
from 2011 no longer exist because they have been recycled.”

The memo’s message was clear. These emails were simply not
available. The IRS had made every effort to recover her emails and
any backups. But the backup tapes were gone, just like the original
hard drive. They had confirmed it.

Apparently, however, they didn’t confirm that it was true of all
types of backup tapes. In addition to the agency’s regularly
recycled IT department backups, the IRS emails were also saved onto
a disaster recovery system used to guarantee continuity of
government in the event of a disaster.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, which
oversees IRS audits,
confirmed at the end of last week that as many as 30,000
missing emails have been recovered from these disaster recovery
tapes during the IG’s investigations. Not all of those emails are
certain to be new to the investigation, but many of them likely
are.

As The Washington Post notes, IRS Commissioner John
Koskinen had admitted the existence of these disaster backups, but
said they would be
too difficult and time-intensive to search. No doubt he’s
thrilled to hear that many of the missing emails have in fact been
found.