Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) sent a letter this week to IRS commissioner John Koskinen asking how 80,000 emails sent or received by Lois Lerner that the IRS said were lost were later recovered.
“I understand that the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) has recovered as many as 80,000 missing emails sent or received by former IRS official Lois Lerner,” wrote Johnson.
“In June 2014, the IRS notified Congress that it had lost emails sent or received by Ms. Lerner between January 2009 and April 2011. In testimony to Congress, you stated that the IRS delayed informing Congress about the missing emails for several months because the IRS went to ‘great lengths’ and made ‘extraordinary efforts’ to find the emails. According to TIGTA, the 80,000 emails were recovered from IRS disaster recovery tapes. Please explain the IRS’s efforts to recover the data from these tapes before the tapes were requested by TIGTA.”
Johnson went on to ask Koskinen to provide details about the agency’s document retention and production process, asking for details such as how the IRS retained, identified and produced emails relating to the investigation and whether or not the IRS has been in communication with Lerner about the missing emails.
The full letter is included below.
