They claimed they had made a herculean effort to recover the e-mails, but to no avail. When no one believed that, they finally relented and allowed someone who knew what they were doing to go in and find the e-mails. That was easy.

First they said that Lois Lerner’s e-mails were lost because her hard drive had crashed. No one who understands anything about information technology believed that one, since there are always system backups, and besides, e-mails are stored on a server, not on an individual machine.

So we can see them now, right? No, sillies! That’s not how it works at all! This just means the IRS will come up with a new excuse not to release them. And that would be . . . ? Why, dupes! They have to check and make sure there are no dupes! Why? Because releasing dupes would be terrible!

Oh, one problem. That’s a lie too:

Attorneys from the Department of Justice representing the IRS say the emails won’t be shared because the service is making sure that none of them are duplicates. Lerner is at the center of a scandal in which the tax agency denied special tax status to conservative groups. Her emails have been sought by members of Congress and conservative groups alike. One of those groups, Judicial Watch, has been seeking emails as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed two years ago. Originally, the IRS said the email trail was permanently lost because the computer drive that contained it crashed. However, the Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration or TIGTA, was able to retrieve 6,400 emails which it has subsequently sent to the agency. It is these emails that the IRS wants to check for duplicates. However, Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton, has said that the inspector general’s office has already checked for copies. “Even though TIGTA already identified and removed emails that were duplicates, the IRS is in ‘the process of conducting further manual deduplication of the 6,400’ emails, rather than reviewing them in response to Judicial Watch’s FOIA requests that are more than two years old now,” Fitton told The Daily Caller. “Our legal team will continue pursuing all necessary and available legal options to hold the IRS accountable for its flagrant abuse of power.”

All I can say is that the content of these e-mails must be pretty damning, if they’re going to this length to hide it. It has to incriminate more than just Lerner, because no one believes she’s innocent anymore. Whatever is in those e-mails must be awfully terrifying to someone who’s willing to go ridiculous far to keep it from being released - and has the authority to make that happen.

Whatever you want to extrapolate from that is up to you. But I’d think big.