Read the full story: Nonprofit Quarterly 

In a Thursday evening meeting of the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) J. Russell George told the committee that his office has been able to recover emails from more than 700 backup tapes secured from the IRS. In light of evidence that suggests some of the tapes may have been erased, and because it is unclear why the IRS delayed producing the tapes and asserted the data from the tapes was unrecoverable, the potential for criminal charges was mentioned…The IRS claims that it has cooperated in all investigations, producing more than 1 million pages of documents and almost 150,000 emails. However, many of the most important communications about Lerner’s conduct in the IRS scandal have come not from investigators and the IRS but as a result of nonprofit watchdog groups like Judicial Watch and Cause of Action submitting Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to agencies other than the IRS—specifically, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and the U.S. Justice Department/FBI.