Thousands More "Missing" Lois Lerner Emails Have Been Found

According to a report in The Hill, the Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration has found thousands of former IRS official Lois Lerner's "missing" emails.

An inspector general investigating the IRS’s improper scrutiny of Tea Party groups has found thousands of emails from Lois Lerner, the agency official at the center of that controversy, according to committees involved in the probe.

Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration (TIGTA) said it found roughly 6,400 emails either to or from Lerner from between 2004 and 2013 that it didn’t think the IRS had turned over to lawmakers, the congressional committees said. The committees have yet to examine the emails, aides on Capitol Hill said.

The IRS said last year that Lerner’s computer crashed in 2011, leaving it unable to reproduce an untold number of her emails over the prior two years.

Of the emails the inspector general found, around 650 were from 2010 and 2011, while most were from 2012. The inspector general found about 35,000 emails in all as it sought to recover emails from recycled back-up tapes.

As a reminder, not only did Lerner say a hard drive crash caused the loss of all of her emails during the period when she engaged in targeting of conservative tea party groups, current IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said the same under oath in front of Congress.

Contempt of Congress charges against Lerner will not be pursued by the Department of Justice.