WASHINGTON — The head of the U.S. House of Representatives panel probing alleged bias by the Internal Revenue Service against conservative groups said former agency official Lois Lerner must have known she was required to keep paper copies of e-mails that vanished when her computer crashed.
“She knew, under the Federal Records Act, that she had an obligation for these documents to be preserved, these e-mails,” said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa, a California Republican, on CNN’s “State of the Union” program Sunday. “And to not have print to paper, which is the policy she had to know, is pretty hard to believe that there aren’t paper copies.”
Lerner’s missing e-mails are the latest twist in a 14-month partisan battle over what prompted the IRS to give extra scrutiny to some groups seeking tax-exempt status. Most of the groups were linked to the Tea Party movement that is seeking to rein in the federal government’s scope.
An inspector general’s report on a damaged hard drive belonging to Lerner should be complete “in a matter of weeks,” according to a letter the IRS sent to House Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen wrote that the agency is working to produce as much of Lerner’s e-mail and other information as possible.
Lerner’s attorney, William Taylor, said his client didn’t violate any record-keeping law requiring paper copies.
“She printed out some things, not others,” Taylor said on CNN. “You can’t print out hundreds of thousands of e-mails.”
Lerner, the central figure in congressional investigations of the IRS handling of tax-exempt groups, has received death threats and has been unfairly portrayed by Republicans as “a demon they can create and point to” in an election year, Taylor said.
Lerner didn’t intentionally damage her computer and made every effort to retrieve the lost records, Taylor said.
“She walked into the office one day and her screen went blue,” Taylor said. “She asked for help in restoring it.”
There have been 2,000 computer crashes at the IRS since Jan. 1, he said.
Issa said investigators will “probably never know” whether Lerner intentionally damaged her own computer.
The hard drive included e-mails and other information from January 2009 through June 2011. The IRS has released e-mails showing that Lerner sought unsuccessfully to have the data recovered.
Backup tapes were recycled after six months, according to the IRS practice at the time, and the hard drive also was recycled.
