Read the full story: Daily Caller
The Internal Revenue Service found 6,400 more Lois Lerner emails — but they’re not handing them over in court.
The IRS’ latest excuses are nothing short of infuriating. Department of Justice lawyers Geoffrey J. Klimas and Stephanie Sasarak, acting as counsel for the IRS, submitted a U.S. District Court filing June 12 in the case Judicial Watch v. Internal Revenue Service. The court filing, provided to The Daily Caller, claims the IRS received new Lerner emails from the Treasury Department’s inspector general (TIGTA) but can’t fork over the emails to Judicial Watch, a nonprofit group suing to get the emails. Why? Because the IRS is busy making sure that none of the emails are duplicates – you know, so as not to waste anyone’s time. However, the inspector general already made sure that none of the emails were duplicates, so the IRS’ latest excuse falls flat. Here are takeaways from the court filing….
TIGTA gave the IRS 6,400 Lerner emails that they recovered from backup tapes:…. TIGTA already checked for duplicate emails:… But the IRS is going to go ahead and do some “deduplication” anyway, just to make sure TIGTA de-duplicated correctly:…
The deduplication might take a long time:…
The IRS isn’t going to start de-duplicating the emails it has until AFTER it reviews “Lerner communications which were not forensically recovered.” In other words, they’re going to review Lerner emails that they DON’T HAVE before they look at the ones that they DO have:…
The legal advocacy group Cause of Action is also encountering ridiculous excuses in its own lawsuit to get Lerner’s emails. Secretary of the Treasury Jacob Lew, Obama’s former White House chief of staff, seized all of the emails that went back and forth between the IRS and the White House and won’t hand them over, arguing that since confidential taxpayer information was illegally disclosed in the emails, then it would be illegal to make the emails public – since they have confidential taxpayer information in them. Get it?
