IRS Commissioner To Testify About Lois Lerner’s Lost Emails

FILE - In this May 22, 2013 file photo, Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner walks out of a House Oversight Committee hearing after refusing to answer questions about the extra scrutiny the IRS gave Tea Part... FILE - In this May 22, 2013 file photo, Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner walks out of a House Oversight Committee hearing after refusing to answer questions about the extra scrutiny the IRS gave Tea Party and other conservative groups that applied for tax-exempt status, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Her lawyer, William W. Taylor, follows at left. The House Ways and Means Committee voted Wednesday, April 9, 2014, to refer Lerner to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution in the agency's tea party controversy. On Thursday, the House Oversight Committee and its tenacious chairman, Darrell Issa, R-Calif., has scheduled a vote on whether to hold Lerner in contempt of Congress for not responding to questions at two Oversight hearings. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File) MORE LESS
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IRS Commissioner John Koskinen is scheduled to testify next week about a former official’s missing emails, House Republicans said on Monday.

The announcement came three days after Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, issued a statement saying the IRS had lost emails from a two-year period that were sent and received by Lois Lerner, the former head of the IRS’ tax-exempt organizations division.

Lerner is the official who first publicly apologized for the IRS’ treatment of conservative groups’ applications for non-profit status, and she has since been the focus of multiple Republican investigations into the matter. Earlier this year, after Lerner continued to refuse to answer questions from his committee, asserting her Fifth Amendment rights, House Oversight Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) told reporters his long-running investigation into the IRS may have hit a “dead end.” In May, the House voted to hold Lerner in contempt of Congress.

In response to the investigations, the IRS has agreed to turn over tens of thousands of Lerner’s emails. But the agency said a 2011 computer crash made an unknown number of emails from the period between January 2009 and April 2011 irretrievable. Not all Lerner’s emails from that period are missing — lawmakers have or will be given Lerner’s emails written to or from other IRS employees. What they don’t have are any emails written “to or from Lerner and persons outside of the IRS,” as Camp put it in a letter to President Obama sent Monday.

The issue is enough for Republicans to ask more questions. On Monday, Camp announced that his committee was interviewing IRS information technology personnel, had sent requests for all communications between Lerner and person working at the White House, Treasury, and the Justice Department (among other agencies). Camp said Koskinen had agreed to testify to his committee on Tuesday, while Issa, in a separate statement, said Koskinen would appear before his committee on Monday.

“I will not tolerate your continued obstruction and game-playing in response to the Committee’s investigation of the IRS targeting,” Issa said in a letter that accompanied a subpoena sent to Koskinen. “For too long, the IRS has promised to produce requested – and, later, subpoenaed – documents, only to respond later with excuses and inaction. Despite your empty promises and broken commitments to cooperation, the IRS still insists on flouting Constitutional congressional oversight.”

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  1. I’m sure that will settle the matter.

  2. And down the rabbit hole the Right Wing Echo Chamber goes! I’m sure a conspiracy over the cover up of the lost email will trigger another Select Committee.

    Remember, they just lost Benghazi.

  3. Avatar for Libs Libs says:

    First Lois Lerner pleads the 5th, now her emails are missing. Imagine that!!! But we all should believe that there was no Democrat’s plot to target Republicans via IRS. Democrats are sure going to great lengths to cover up this “non-existent scandal”.

  4. Which Republican groups lost their tax-exempt status as a result of this insidious targeting?

  5. The real issue, one of them anyway, is that IRS employees had to archive their emails to their local hard drive because they didn’t have enough resources to add disk space to their server. I wonder if they’re still doing that?

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