'This is an ideologically driven administration,' said Issa. Issa: Lerner's 'smoking gun' email

Rep. Darrell Issa on Thursday called Lois Lerner’s recently surfaced emails a “smoking gun” in the IRS scandal.

“[This is] a smoking gun, this is Lois Lerner clearly cautioning people not to say things on email and be delighted to find out that the local instant chat they have, this Microsoft product, wasn’t tracking what they said,” Issa, a California Republican said on Fox News.


On Wednesday, new emails released by the House Oversight Republicans show Lerner warning her colleagues to be careful about what they write in emails amid congressional inquiries into whether the agency was targeting conservative interest groups.

( Also on POLITICO: Lerner warned against email chatter)

“I think the important thing is she was trying to make sure that on April 9 of 2013 that, in fact, her people weren’t being tracked and she was still using words like ‘caution,’” said Issa, who is chairman for the House Oversight Committee, which is in charge of the IRS investigation. “Why? She didn’t want an audit trail of what they’d been doing and what they were doing was targeting conservatives for their views, no question at all.”

During the interview, “Fox and Friends” host Brian Kilmeade read correspondence between Lerner and Maria Hooke, the director of business systems planning for the tax-exempt division. After asking Hooke if the agency’s internal instant message conversations, called OCS, were searchable, Hooke responded, “OCS messages are not set to automatically save, parties involved in an OCS conversation can copy and save the contents of their conversation on an email or file.”

“Perfect,” Lerner responded on April 9, 2013.

( Also on POLITICO: Landmark tax evasion law quietly kicks in)

“It’s very clear that on April 9, 2013, well into this investigation, she’s still on the job and she’s still covering her tracks and considering, if you will, whether they are covered,” Issa said.

Issa added, “This is an ideologically driven administration that all of its tentacles are targeting against what they don’t like, and its scary.”

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