Camp Calls for Special Prosecutor in Missing IRS E-Mails

By Derek Wallbank June 20, 2014

The House Ways and Means Committee chairman called for a special prosecutor to probe the Internal Revenue Service’s loss of e-mails from the time the agency gave extra scrutiny to Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status.
“We are missing a huge piece of the puzzle,” committee Chairman Dave Camp said at a hearing today in Washington. The two years of missing e-mails cover the “very peak” of the IRS scrutiny, the Michigan Republican said. “How convenient for the IRS and the administration.”
The IRS said last week that a computer crash, combined with routine recycling of backup tapes, meant it couldn’t recover many e-mails written from 2009 to 2011 by Lois Lerner, director of exempt organizations at the time.
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IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told the committee today a computer hard drive was destroyed and recycled in line with normal processes, prompting audible groans from Republicans on the panel.
The Obama administration also released a letter that said Lerner didn’t exchange any e-mails with White House officials during that period.
Reviewers “were unable to identify any communications between Lois Lerner and persons within” the president’s executive office, W. Neil Eggleston, a White House counsel, said in a June 18 letter to Camp and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden. The letter didn’t explain how officials came to that conclusion.
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Republicans have said the IRS gave extra scrutiny to some Tea Party-related groups asking for tax-exempt status.
IRS documents said after Lerner’s computer hard drive crashed in 2011, experts at the IRS Criminal Investigations forensic lab unsuccessfully attempted to recover its contents. In a July 19, 2011, e-mail, Lerner told the technicians there were “irreplaceable” documents that she wanted to retrieve.
Koskinen read a statement describing the computer crash and IRS response. Camp responded that the statement didn’t include an apology.
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“I don’t think an apology is owed,” Koskinen responded.
To contact the reporter on this story: Derek Wallbank in Washington at dwallbank@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jodi Schneider at jschneider50@bloomberg.net Laurie Asseo