Surprise, 30,000 Lois Lerner IRS Emails Discovered Late Friday Afternoon

by Dan Riehl

Nov 21, 2014 4:35 PM PT

If a Friday afternoon when the GOP is suing the administration over the Affordable Care Act, while still scrambling internally to formulate an official response to last night's announced amnesty for five million illegal immigrants, isn't the best time to suddenly discover 30,000 Lois Lerner emails once pronounced lost forever, it's difficult to think of a better one if one's intention is to minimize the news.

Up to 30,000 missing emails sent by former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner have been recovered by the IRS inspector general, five months after they were deemed lost forever.

The U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) informed congressional staffers from several committees on Friday that the emails were found among hundreds of “disaster recovery tapes” that were used to back up the IRS email system.

“They just said it took them several weeks and some forensic effort to get these emails off these tapes,” a congressional aide told the Washington Examiner.

Yes, sometimes things just happen that way. And when the Obama administration finally leaves office, they're all going to go into the used cars sales business together, too. Imagine that.

Committees in the House and Senate are seeking the emails, which they believe could show Lerner was working in concert with Obama administration officials to target conservative and Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status before the 2012 presidential election.

The missing emails extend from 2009 to 2011, a period when Lerner headed the IRS’s exempt-organizations division. The emails were lost when Lerner’s computer crashed, IRS officials said earlier this year.

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