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The IRS claims that thousands of emails written to and by Lois Lerner were lost when her computer hard drive crashed

Lerner is the central figure in the tea-party scandal in which hundreds of applications by non-profit groups were held up

Congress now needs to delve into an investigation of IRS claims about the lost emails%2C including testimony of IT personnel

If the IRS had wanted to do something really big — something really outlandish and attention-grabbing — in hopes of reviving the election-season harassment of conservative organizations as a national story, the agency could not have come up with a better scheme than this one:

Late Friday, the IRS told congressional investigators it lost more than two years worth of Lois Lerner emails.

That's right. The IRS claims a failed hard drive on Lerner's computer caused thousands of emails to disappear.

Lerner is the central figure in the IRS's tea-party harassment scandal.

She concocted the preposterous ruse to blame line officers in Cincinnati for inordinately scrutinizing and delaying the applications of conservative non-profit groups. She invoked her constitutional right against self-incrimination by refusing to testify before Congress. And, Lerner inappropriately shipped 12,000 tax returns of non-profit groups to the FBI.

Lerner, in other words, appears to be neck deep in the effort to silence and intimidate conservative non-profit groups leading up to the 2012 national elections. But now we learn from the IRS that emails sent to and from Lerner between January 2009 and April 2011 are just … gone. Wiped out by a computer crash.

The "lost" emails include any electronic communication with the departments of Justice and the Treasury, with congressional Democrats and with the White House. That would be everyone Republicans suspect Lerner may have collaborated with in the targeting scheme.

Even if Lerner were not the central figure in a national scandal, this explanation would sound deeply suspicious. What organization the size of the IRS stores data exclusively on a single computer's hard drive?

Workplace data typically is stored on servers and backed up in multiple ways. If the IRS story about the Lerner emails is to be believed — and that would constitute a substantial "if" — the agency needs to provide exhaustive evidence its claims are true.

It can start by documenting when and by whom the crash was first discovered. It needs to provide witnesses — including computer techs testifying under oath — about what they learned and what they did to recover what was lost.

Agency officials also need to testify why redundancies common to all large organizations were not used to back up Lerner's emails.

In its report to Congress about the loss, the IRS rather cheekily suggested it has expended $10 million worth of labor to produce documents in the tea-party investigation, and that that should be quite enough, thank you.

There are alternatives. House Ways & Means Committee chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., could bypass this latest diversionary tactic by giving Lerner immunity from prosecution and requiring her to testify under oath.

There is no real telling if or when the hot-then-cold investigation will go cold again in the public's eye.

But Congress simply cannot let this dog-ate-the-homework explanation pass.