After a year and a half of investigating, Congress has finally gotten to see a large number of the “missing” emails form IRS administrator Lois Lerner. Some of these emails seem to show that Obama’s Department of Justice (DOJ) was involved in the IRS targeting of conservative groups, a Forbes report says.
Despite the government’s refusal to release over 800 pages of Lerner communications, some documents that have been released show that she was discussing the targeting of conservative groups with members of the DOJ two years before the IRS even admitted that its actions were improper.
“Ms. Lerner,” Forbes columnist Robert W. Wood wrote, “met with top officials from the DOJ’s Election Crimes Branch in October of 2010. Although Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the DOJ, the DOJ coughed up dirt only on court order. Even then, the DOJ handed over only two pages of heavily redacted emails.”
The documents show that Lerner worked with the DOJ on targeting conservative groups and even show that Lerner sent the DOJ a “1.1 million page database of information from 501(c)(4) tax exempt organizations” that contained confidential tax records.
On November 22 it was announced that some 30,000 IRS emails that had previously been deemed “unrecoverable” had been “found” by the IRS Inspector General. The emails extend from 2009 to 2011, when Lerner headed the IRS’s exempt-organizations division.
While investigators have yet to comb through this mountain of information, other key documents were finally revealed in a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by government watchdog group Judicial Watch.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said that the documents show that Obama’s DOJ was “up to its neck in the IRS scandal” and remarked in outrage that the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, which is supposed to be investigating such abuse of authority, is “now implicated in the IRS crimes.”
“It is shameful how Establishment Washington has let slide by Obama’s abuse of the IRS and the Justice Department,” Fitton said. “Only as a result of Judicial Watch’s independent investigations did the American people learn about the IRS-DOJ prosecution discussions of Obama’s political enemies and how the IRS sent, in violation of law, confidential taxpayer information to the FBI and DOJ in 2010. Richard Nixon was impeached for less.”