"Potential Criminal Activity" As IRS Straight-Up Lies to Congress and Refuses to Look for Back-Up Tapes for Lois Lerner Emails

Every IT-savvy commenter and coblogger was saying that all of these emails are periodically backed up to tapes which are always available.

The IRS kept claiming they weren't. They claimed they were lost, or missing, or "recycled" every six months.

People not in the IRS kept saying "Bullshit, the point of the tapes is to keep them forever."

So yes. This new investigator, Mr. Camus, set out to find the tapes which the IRS head swore under oath did not exist and he found them. In two weeks.

(#twoweeks)

This suggests the very real policy that multiple hands at the IRS deliberately lied to Congress in order to end Congress' search for the tapes, and that they further did not do the minimum due diligence required by law in cooperating with a federal subpoena: As Mr. Camus states, when he went to the storage facility in West Virginia, which is "exactly where you'd expect [the tapes] to be," the IT people there found them immediately, and furthermore said that no one had ever before asked for the tapes.

See the second video as well. Camus recovered 424 new tapes only because a document tipped him to the existence of these tapes. But the IRS withheld that document from him, seeking, it appears, to hide the existence of this tapes from the duly-authorized investigators.

The IRS withheld the document from him; apparently he got hold of it by other means.

And here's one of the emails recently recovered from these allegedly lost, destroyed, or recycled tapes:

Update: JohnE and I published at the same minute. So let's merge them.Here is JohnE's post:

Not even a smidgen.

The IRS’s inspector general confirmed Thursday it is conducting a criminal investigation into how Lois G. Lerner’s emails disappeared, saying it took only two weeks for investigators to find hundreds of tapes the agency’s chief had told Congress were irretrievably destroyed.

Meanwhile, check the date on this screencap of a Lois Lerner:

If you can believe it, here's an actual email sent by Lois Lerner: pic.twitter.com/1VY09EYaCz

— GOP Oversight (@GOPoversight) February 27, 2015

It was only a few weeks before this email that House Ways and Means Chairman David Camp first sent a letter to the IRS questioning the possible targeting of conservatives.

On a positive note, the IRS rewarded Lerner with nearly $130,000 in bonuses. So, y'know, it's not all bad news.

posted by Ace at 12:27 PM

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