The Internal Revenue Service admitted in court Wednesday that the agency has not searched any of its standard computer systems for Lois Lerner’s missing emails.

According to a new IRS legal brief in the agency’s court battle with the nonprofit group Judicial Watch, IRS lawyers said that IRS officials did not search for Lerner’s emails.

Here are the reasons given:

Why the IRS didn’t search computer servers: “the servers would not result in the recovery of any information.”

Why the IRS didn’t look at backup tapes: “no reason to believe that the tapes are a potential source of recovering” the missing emails.

The IRS did not “submit declarations about any of the foregoing items because it had no reason to believe that they were sources from which to recover information lost as a result of Lerner’s hard drive failure,” the agency admitted.

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