House Republicans accused the IRS on Tuesday of trying to cover up that it couldn’t reproduce some of former agency official Lois Lerner’s emails.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) and Rep. Charles Boustany (R-La.), a senior committee member, also write that evidence now suggests that the IRS knew about the issue weeks or months before the IRS commissioner, John Koskinen, said the agency would hand over all of Lerner’s emails.
{mosads}“The White House promised full cooperation, the commissioner promised full access to Lois Lerner emails and now the agency claims it cannot produce those materials and they’ve known for months they couldn’t do this,” Camp and Boustany said.
Koskinen told Ways and Means on May 8 that the IRS would give the committee all of Lerner’s emails. The IRS told lawmakers on Friday that some of Lerner’s emails can’t be recovered because her computer crashed in 2011.
On top of that, the two GOP lawmakers charge that the IRS can’t reproduce emails from six other officials besides Lerner — including Nikole Flax, the chief of staff to former acting commissioner Steven Miller, who President Obama pushed out in the early days of the IRS’s targeting controversy.
All in all, Camp and Boustany say the IRS’s broader problems turning over key documents suggest that “the American people were lied to.”
The two Republicans also called for giving an independent prosecutor free reign to investigate the IRS targeting controversy, saying that’s the only way for Democrats to have credibility.
“This entire case started with the White House and top Democrats in the Senate using the bully pulpit to bully law-abiding Americans because they dared to stand up for their own political beliefs,” they added, insisting that the administration had “slow-walked” the investigation.
The IRS told lawmakers on Friday that it couldn’t recover all of Lerner’s emails from 2009 to mid-2011, as Republicans had requested. The agency didn’t immediately comment on whether the email issues were more widespread, or when officials knew about the problems.
The agency said that it limits the amount of emails that its roughly 90,000 employees can keep in their in-boxes. Before May 2013, the agency also recycled the digital tapes that backed up employee emails every six months.
Because of that, the IRS says that archived emails could be lost if an official’s hard drive crashes — which is what the agency says happened to Lerner in 2011.
Lerner jumpstarted the IRS controversy in May 2013 when she apologized for the agency’s improper scrutiny of Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status.
Camp and Boustany also noted that Flax visited the White House on a regular basis. Flax shows up more than two dozen times on White House visitor logs, often for meetings in recent years with officials implementing the healthcare law.
House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is also examining whether the IRS violated the Federal Records Act, though Democrats say he has known that Lerner’s computer crashed for months.
Koskinen is expected to testify before the Oversight Committee on Monday, and before Ways and Means on Tuesday.