IRS barely looked for Lois Lerner’s missing emails

There were six different places the Internal Revenue Service could have searched for Lois Lerner’s “missing” emails. But a House of Representative watchdog committee says the agency only ever tried to search one of them.

The IRS’s failure of self-scrutiny and due diligence came via a new report from the House Oversight Committee Monday, which calls on President Barack Obama to hold IRS Commissioner John Koskinen accountable for the lapse.

“Throughout his tenure, Commissioner Koskinen has obstructed the Congressional investigations” into the IRS’ political discrimination against conservative nonprofit groups, the Committee wrote. “… We ask that you exercise your authority … to remove John Koskinen as Commissioner of the IRS.”

As Americans for Tax Reform wrote Tuesday, the IRS neglected to seek out the possible locations of Lerner’s 24,000 emails — save for the hard drive, perhaps. But even that isn’t a certainty.

From the website of Americans for Tax Reform:

According to TIGTA [Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration] official Timothy Camus, the IRS had six possible sources to search for Lois Lerner’s emails:

“The hard drive would have been a source, Blackberry source, backup tapes a source, the backup tapes for the server drives and then finally the loaner lap tops.”

When asked how many of these sources the IRS searched, Camus says was unable to say for certain whether the IRS had searched any, although he acknowledged it appears the agency did search Lerner’s hard drive:

“We’re not aware that they searched any one in particular. They did — it appears they did look into initially whether or not the hard drive had been destroyed, but they didn’t go much further than that.”

The agency’s refusal to conduct due diligence in its search for Lerner’s emails meant that 1,000 emails were not found until TIGTA searched backup tapes. When asked why the IRS did not give these emails to Congress, Camus said it was because the agency never looked for them in the first place:

“To the best we can determine through the investigation, they just simply didn’t look for those emails.”

Despite this, Koskinen has told congressional investigators that the agency went to “extraordinary efforts” to track down Lerner’s potentially incriminating emails — but that its own internal investigators had met with only limited success.

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