While controversy still swirls over whether the Internal Revenue Service has backup tapes with the “lost” e-mails of former IRS executive Lois Lerner, an IRS attorney confirmed that the agency had disposed of Lerner’s government-issued BlackBerry in June of 2012.

That would mean that the destruction of the data on the phone—including e-mails that may have been part of the missing messages both Congress and the conservative advocacy group Judicial Watch have sought from the agency—happened after congressional staffers had begun asking her about the alleged targeting of conservative nonprofit groups. But it was over a year after the loss of e-mails on Lerner’s personal computer due to a reported hard drive crash.

In a declaration by the IRS in response to Judicial Watch’s lawsuit, IRS Deputy Assistant Chief Counsel Thomas Kane wrote that the BlackBerry phone had been “removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012.”

Earlier this week, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton claimed that Justice Department lawyers had told one of his attorneys that backups of the missing e-mails exist, but he said that retrieving them would be “too onerous.” Unidentified administration officials have reportedly told multiple news outlets that this statement was a misunderstanding and that there were no additional backups uncovered—the tapes in question are the same, recycled backup tapes the IRS previously mentioned, and an inspector general investigation had been looking into whether any data from the e-mails lost on Lerner’s crashed hard drive could be retrieved.

While Lerner had been in discussions with staffers of the House Oversight Committee prior to the destruction of the BlackBerry, the committee did not subpoena Lerner’s e-mails until this June. This move came after the IRS agreed in March to turn over all of Lerner’s e-mails and then discovered that e-mails stored on her personal computer had been lost in a 2011 hard drive crash. Until recently, the IRS restricted employees’ e-mail inbox size to 150 megabytes, forcing employees to retain messages in an Outlook PST file on their desktop and laptop PCs.

Given that the range of e-mails that both Congress and Judicial Watch are seeking were from a period from 2009 to 2011, it’s uncertain at best that any of those e-mails would have been on Lerner’s BlackBerry in June of 2012—especially since they were removed from her Microsoft Exchange inbox.