So the IRS Destroyed Lois Lerner's 2009-2012 Blackberry, After Congressional Investigations Into Her Targeting Had Begun

After you're all out of your list of plausible excuses, what you have remaining are your implausible ones.

The IRS filing in federal Judge Emmet Sullivan's court reveals shocking new information. The IRS destroyed Lerner's Blackberry AFTER it knew her computer had crashed and after a Congressional inquiry was well underway. As an IRS official declared under the penalty of perjury, the destroyed Blackberry would have contained the same emails (both sent and received) as Lois Lerner's hard drive.

We all know by now that Lois Lerner’s hard drive crashed in June 2011 and was destroyed by IRS. The emails of up to twenty other related IRS officials were missing in remarkably similar "crashes," leading many to speculate that Lois Lerner’s Blackberry perhaps held the key. Now, the [New York] Observer can confirm that a year after the infamous hard drive crash, the IRS destroyed Ms. Lerner's Blackberry--and without making any effort to retain the emails from it.

Judge Sullivan has had to pry information from the IRS to learn anything about Ms. Lerner's Blackberry. Now, with these latest revelations, I’m confident he’s not finished.

...

With incredible disregard for the law and the Congressional inquiry, the IRS admits that this Blackberry "was removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012." This is a year after her hard drive "crash" and months after the Congressional inquiry began.

Combine this with yesterday's report that all of Lois Lerner's emails actually are saved on a backup system, but the IRS says it would be too hard to retrieve them and so it's not going to trouble itself, and you begin to have doubts about the IRS' commitment to finding these emails.

posted by Ace at 01:56 PM

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