POLITICO Pro Thousands of lost Lerner IRS emails found by IG

An Internal Revenue Service watchdog has located an estimated 30,000 of the lost Lois Lerner emails, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration told congressional staffers Friday the emails belonging to the most controversial figure in the IRS controversy were located on disaster recovery tapes.


The IRS told Congress in late spring that it had lost two years worth of the former head of the tax-exempt division’s emails in a 2011 hard drive crash. They didn’t believe the emails had been backed up anywhere and said her broken hard drive had been recycled.

Lawmakers balked at being told more than a year after the original scandal broke — and several months after the IRS and White House found out.

Republicans said they didn’t believe the IRS and Lerner about the crash — particularly because of the period for which the emails were missing, between 2009 and 2011. That’s around the time the IRS began singling out conservative groups for additional scrutiny.

The inspector general report on the matter attributed the mess to management screw-ups.

TIGTA, which wrote the original report about the tea party controversy, was asked to look into the missing emails matter. A report on the matter is due out soon.

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen had said that he hopes TIGTA can find the tapes, as the agency could not — but he told Congress the hard drive, and likely emails, were gone for good as far as IRS officials knew.

Lerner asserts that she didn’t do anything wrong. She has invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and will not answer questions from Congress.