The IRS never looked for Lois Lerner’s lost emails

 Before I get into this post I wanted mention that Eric Holder used election day to dump documents related to the Fast and Furious scandal, if you missed that story you can check it out here.

  Now on to the IRS targeting scandal:

  This story will probably not come as a surprise to anyone who has been following the IRS targeting scandal, but the IRS admitted in court today that the corrupt agency made no real effort to recover any of Lois Lerner’s lost emails.

  Here is more:

Judicial Watch announced today that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) admitted to the court that it failed to search any of the IRS standard computer systems for the “missing” emails of Lois Lerner and other IRS officials. The admission appears in an IRS legal brief opposing the Judicial Watch request that a federal court judge allow discovery into how “lost and/or destroyed” IRS records relating to the targeting of conservative groups may be retrieved.

[I]t has become apparent that the IRS did not undertake any significant efforts to obtain the emails from alternative sources following the discovery that the emails were missing. The emails are potentially responsive to Plaintiff’s FOIA requests, and the IRS’s failure to search for them in other recordkeeping systems raises material questions of fact about whether the agency has conducted a reasonable search.

   We have known for quite some time that the excuse about Lois Lerner’s emails disappearing due to a computer crash, or multiple computer crashes, was bogus from the beginning because emails are not stored on hard-drives, they are stored on servers.

  Why then did the IRS not search the servers for the backups of the lost emails? According to the IRS they determined they most likely were not there so they did not bother to try:

IRS attorneys conceded that they had failed to search the agency’s servers for missing emails because they decided that “the servers would not result in the recovery of any information.”

  Or perhaps the agency knew the emails were there and that is why they did not look for them, plausible deniability…

  The IRS gave the same excuse for not looking at the other mandated backups:

They admitted they had failed to search the agency’s disaster recovery tapes because they had “no reason to believe that the tapes are a potential source of recovering” the missing emails.  And they conceded that they had not searched the government-wide back-up system because they had “no reason to believe such a system … even exists.”

  Judicial Watch has been able to get more information through the court system on the scandal than the establishment Republicans in Washington, why is that?

  I have written in the past that I believe the establishment Republicans in Washington were not really interested in getting to the bottom of the IRS targeting scandal because in the end they and the Democrats had a common enemy–the Tea Party–and so they had a vested interest in taking down what they felt was a threat to their power. They put on a show for the base but that was all.

  Now that the election is over and the Republicans have solidified their hold on the House and have taken over the Senate there is no excuse to not appoint a special prosecutor to investigate this scandal.

  Failure to do so at this point will prove to me that the Republicans are duplicitous in this scandal, if not during the scandal at least as accessories after the fact.