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BREAKING: Lerner backup tapes deleted AFTER Congressional subpoena

Town Hall

According to new information from the House Oversight Committee, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration [TIGTA] Russell George and Deputy Inspector General for Investigations Tim Camus, the IRS deleted hundreds of backup tapes containing thousands of emails belonging to former IRS official Lois Lerner, the woman at the center of the conservative targeting scandal. The tapes were destroyed nine months after a congressional subpoena was issued to the agency demanding they be preserved and turned over.

March 2014; 30 days after Obama says that there is not a smidgen of corruption at the IRS. The tapes were degaussed, which means magnetically destroyed rather than overwritten and reused for new backup information. The only reason to degauss a tape is to destroy the information on it. And this takes place over 6 months after a congressional subpoena for those emails was issued, with Koskinen assuring us the whole time that the emails had been archived and would be provided to Congress... right up until the time he told us the emails were lost.

The Inspector General testified that the IRS did NOT look for Lerner emails:
* On the IRS email server
* On Lerner's blackberry
* On any of the laptops that Lerner might have been loaned when hers failed
* On the backup tapes

So where did they spend millions of dollars and so much time pretending to look for Lerner emails?

Town Hall

"As Ms. Lerner’s hard drive could not be recovered and the 422 tapes most likely to have contained Ms. Lerner’s e-mails from 2010 and 2011 were erased in March 2014, we were unable to recover all of the missing e-mails. Comparing the IRS e-mail transaction logs to the IRS production to the Congress revealed there could be as many as 23,000 to 24,000 additional missing e-mails. As a result of the investigative process, TIGTA was successful in recovering over 1,000 e-mails that the IRS did not produce to the Congress, DOJ,or TIGTA. The investigation also revealed that prior to our investigation and our efforts to recover Ms. Lerner’s missing emails; the IRS did not search for, review or examine the two separate sources of backup tapes, the server hard drives, or the loaner laptops that ultimately produced new, previously undisclosed emails,"

And so there are only 1,000 emails that could be recovered, a very small fraction of the over 20,000 emails that were logged by the IRS email servers to or from Lerner during the same period. The IRS destroyed -- degaussed -- those 23,000 emails rather than provide them to Congress. We will likely never get the vast majority of those emails from that period due to the IRS degaussing them.

Unless there is a solid bombshell piece of evidence in those 1000 emails, we will likely see the end of this investigation shortly. But we should not. We should be investigating the person who participated in both the targeting and the coverup operation, IRS Chief Counsel Wilkins.

This entry was published Fri Jun 26 00:12:09 CDT 2015 by TriggerFinger and last updated 2015-06-26 00:12:09.0. [Tweet]

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