IRS claims it has LOST two years' worth of emails from embattled former official Lois Lerner as tea party targeting scandal heats up again

By DAVID MARTOSKO, U.S. POLITICAL EDITOR

The Internal Revenue Service has lost two years worth of emails to and from embattled former tax official Lois Lerner, the agency told congressional investigators on Friday.

The IRS promised on May 8 to turn over all her emails but now blames a computer crash for huge tranches of missing documents.

Lerner is under investigation for allegedly orchestrating a years-long program that targeted tea party groups and other conservative organizations for unusually intrusive scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status beginning in the year before the 2010 congressional midterm elections.

The House Ways and Means Committee, one of two bodies probing the case, said Friday that the IRS says that for the period of January 2009 through April 2011, the only Lerner emails it can find are those that were sent to or from other IRS employees.

Emails whose sender or recipient was outside the government, or inside other agencies, have mysteriously disappeared.

Those include the White House, the Justice and Treasury Departments, the Federal Elections Commission and Democratic congressional offices.

Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp, a Michigan Republican, said Friday that 'the fact that I am just learning about this, over a year into the investigation, is completely unacceptable.'

'He also said the claim 'calls into question the credibility of the IRS’s response to congressional inquiries.'

Camp pointed a finger at IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, who pledged in a March 26 hearing to produce every document the agency had which might be related to the scandal.

'It appears now that was an empty promise,' Camp said, complaining that without emails between Lerner and government officials outside the IRS, 'we are conveniently left to believe that Lois Lerner acted alone.'

Republicans in Congress have charged that Obama administration officials were part of a conspiracy to hamstring tea party groups in 2010 and beyond, since denying or delaying their tax-exemption applications prevented them from raising money during the years when their influence was at its highest.