Free Republic

WASHINGTON (AP) — IRS employees erased computer backup tapes a month after officials discovered that thousands of emails related to the tax agency's tea party scandal had been lost, according to government investigators. The investigators, however, concluded that employees erased the tapes by mistake, not as part of an attempt to destroy evidence. As many as 24,000 emails were lost because 422 backup tapes were erased, according to J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration. The revelation is likely to fuel conspiracy theories among conservatives who say the IRS has obstructed congressional investigations into the scandal. George...

The quest of those victimized by the IRS’s discriminatory treatment of conservative groups hit a brick wall when U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton ruled that the plaintiffs failed to prove that denial of access to the emails would result in “irreparable” harm. “True the Vote,” a conservative organization dedicated to combating vote fraud, had requested that a forensic expert of the court’s choosing attempt to recover the “lost” emails of IRS official Lois Lerner. Lerner has refused to testify to Congress on the grounds that such testimony would be “self incriminating.” Nonetheless, Judge Walton characterized the plaintiff’s suspicions as...

Chalk up another victory for out of control government and its related rampant abuse of power. A lawsuit brought by the conservative group “True the Vote” asking to have a forensic expert of the court’s choosing attempt to recover the “lost” Lois Lerner emails has been denied. U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton said in his decision that the plaintiff failed to show “irreparable harm” as a result of the “lost” emails, which, since the contents of them is unknown to those who were not involved in the criminal activities, would likely be an impossible thing to prove before the...

The IRS declared under oath and penalty of perjury on Friday that Lois Lerner’s hard drive is irrecoverable after being wiped clean by tech staff and recycled with an outside contractor, according to a court filing.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said it can't provide emails sent between 2009 and 2011 that were requested by congressional investigators because of hard drive crashes. The agency said that emails stored on dead drives were lost forever because its email backup tapes were recycled every six months, and employees were responsible for keeping their own long-term archives. The IRS had a contract with email backup service vendor Sonasoft starting in 2005, according to FedSpending.org, which lists the contract as being for "automatic data processing services." Sonasoft's motto is "email archiving done right," and the company lists the IRS as...

In his first Congressional appearance since news of the lost Lois Lerner emails, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen was alternately attacked by Republicans and praised by Democrats who apologized to him for his treatment and called the investigation an “endless conspiracy theory” by Republicans. Under oath before the House Ways and Means Committee, Koskinen restated what Congress had been told privately: that emails of Lerner and six other relevant IRS officials have been irretrievably lost because of crashes of their hard drives and servers. Koskinen defended not telling Congress in numerous previous appearances about the email losses. In those appearances, he...