House to hear from IRS head on lost emails

WASHINGTON -- The Internal Revenue Service commissioner will testify before two House committees next week about the agency's disclosure that it lost thousands of emails sought by investigators looking into accusations of politically motivated misconduct by the agency, the committees said Monday.

The IRS told congressional investigators Friday that two years' worth of emails sent and received by Lois Lerner, the former official at the center of the inquiry, had been destroyed because of a computer crash in mid-2011. The committees are examining whether the lost emails involved obstruction or a violation of the Federal Records Act, aides to the committees said.

The disclosure, included in an IRS filing to the Senate Finance Committee, added to suspicions among Republican lawmakers that the IRS was not cooperating fully with the investigations into the agency's treatment of conservative political groups seeking tax-exempt status during the 2012 election cycle.

"I will not tolerate your continued obstruction and game-playing," Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the chairman of the Oversight Committee, wrote in a letter to the IRS commissioner, John Koskinen, on Monday after issuing a subpoena for him to appear.

The scandal has divided Republicans and Democrats on the various committees investigating the IRS. An aide to Democrats on the Oversight Committee, who spoke Monday on the condition of anonymity, said the lost emails had been disclosed previously in IRS documents received by the committee under subpoena, and that Issa was feigning surprise.

Koskinen is to appear before Issa's committee on Monday night and, voluntarily, before the Ways and Means Committee next Tuesday. The Ways and Means Committee chairman, Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., wrote a letter to President Barack Obama on Monday asking for "all communications between Lois Lerner and any persons with the executive office of the president" for the period between January 2009 and May 2011, when the lost emails were exchanged.

Republican lawmakers, after first demanding emails and other documents directly related to the agency's scrutiny of political groups, later expanded their inquiry to include all emails sent and received by Lerner in an attempt to establish coordination between the IRS and other agencies, including the Federal Election Committee, the Justice Department and the White House.

The IRS initially provided 11,000 of Lerner's emails that it deemed directly related to the applications for tax exemption filed by political groups. Under pressure from Republican leaders, Koskinen agreed to provide all of Lerner's emails but also repeatedly emphasized the labor costs involved in such an undertaking.

"If you want them all, we'll give them all to you," he told the House Oversight Committee in March, but he added that doing so might take years.

Since then, the IRS has provided roughly 32,000 more emails directly from Lerner's account.

After the agency discovered that its initial search of Lerner's emails was incomplete for the period between January 2009 and April 2011 because of the computer crash, it recovered 24,000 of the missing messages from email accounts on the other end of Lerner's correspondence, according to the agency's filing Friday.

Although Koskinen had indicated in congressional testimony that emails sent and received by the IRS' 90,000 employees were stored on servers in the agency's archives and could be recovered, the disclosure Friday said that was not the case.

The agency said that because of financial and computing restraints, some emails "that do not qualify as official records" had been stored only on individuals' computers and not on servers and that "backup tapes" from 2011 "no longer exist because they have been recycled."

The IRS went on to say that after May 2013, it changed its archival policy so backup devices would no longer be recycled. It also said that it was not in contact with Lerner, who quit in September after serving as the head of the agency's division on tax-exempt organizations, and could not interview her.

The revelation of lost emails is likely to further inflame the battle over the IRS investigations, which Democratic lawmakers have called a politically motivated attempt to create an impression of a conspiracy.

Last month, the Republican-led House voted to hold Lerner in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer lawmakers' questions about her role in holding up applications for tax exemption from conservative political groups.

A Section on 06/17/2014

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