What the IRS Commissioner Said About Those Lois Lerner Emails Back in March

sharylattkisson.com ^ | June 15, 2014 | Shayrl Atkisson

[don-o]

Friday’s revelation that the IRS “lost” Lois Lerner’s emails in a computer crash came ten months after Congress first requested them and seven months after they were first subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee. But what IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testified about the emails at a hearing in March appears to be at odds with his agency’s newer reported claims that the emails are irretrievable.

Under questioning by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) on the House Oversight Committee, Koskinen said IRS emails are “get taken off and stored in servers.” That was part of the reason, he said, it was so difficult to provide them in a timely fashion.

As of March, the IRS had reportedly given Congress more than 400,000 pages of documents: just not the ones at issue.

Other testimony from the hearing:

Koskinen said, at the time, it would be 2015 before the Committee got the documents it subpoenaed. That means he predicted it would take the tax agency a year and a half from the time the material was first requested to provide it.

Koskinen said the IRS uses Microsoft Outlook but that a simple search through a user’s “sent” and “in” boxes would not turn up the emails because “they’re stored somewhere.”

Koskinen indicated that seven months after the request, the agency had not yet begun serious work to turn over Lois Lerner’s emails. But he said, “We can find, and we are in fact searching, we can find Lois Lerner’s emails.” He made no mention of a computer or system “crash.”

[Robert357]

I guess when Joe Wilson said “You lie” he was right not only about the President, but the entire Executive branch of this President's Administration!

[VRW Conspirator]

We will either find the backups or find clues about who destroyed them.

And the person who was stupid enough to destroy the emails better have been smart enough to save copies to cover his buttocks...or else he will go under the bus and the rest of the criminals will be stepping on the gas pedal.

[DouglasKC]

They are flatout, baldfaced lying. The Republicans NEED to say this and push the point. They are total idiots. The longer they get away with "we lost it" and the press prints it this way the worse it is.

Oh yeah...excuse me...I forgot. Most Republicans don't really care. They are perfectly happy to let this happen and only make a little stink so they can get re-elected. They're not really interested.

My bad. Carry on.

[dead]

They need to figure out who hired Craig Livingston to be the IRS IT Director.

[McBuff]

I am sick and tired of the defeated ones that post here.

Facing the hard truths is not an expression of defeat, but is, rather, the proper measure by which we can find what it will take to change our direction as a nation. Hint: read the quote from John Adams, again.

[mmichaels1970]

This isn’t done on the individual computers but at the mail server.

I agree. Only home users or the very smallest of businesses would ever keep emails stored in something like a .PST file where they are pulled off of the server and stored locally.

There is no way this is being done at government agencies. If they lost two years of HER emails due to a crash, they lost two years of EVERYBODY'S emails.

[TribalPrincess2U]

I agree

[ncfool]

Obama and Jarrett are in the missing emails.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks don-o.