The Justice Department intentionally prevented the search of off-site IRS data storage facilities containing backups of Lois Lerner's supposedly missing emails related to the targeting of conservative groups, a lawyer representing one of the groups told The Daily Caller.
The emails could shine much needed light on the targeting of nonprofit conservative groups by the IRS, but the agency has claimed since June that the emails were lost when Lerner's hard drive crashed.
As Congress probed the possibility that the IRS was indeed targeting conservative groups, the agency released a memo describing the extensive search it conducted for the "missing emails."
The IRS had "never before undertaken a document production of this size and scope," the agency said, claiming it deployed hundreds of employees, invested over 100,000 man-hours, and millions of dollars searching for Lerner's missing emails.
But the agency maintained that all emails were lost when Lerner's hard drive crashed and could not be recovered. Furthermore, the IRS said the backup tapes "no longer exist because they have been recycled," reported Reason.
But on Thursday, Treasury Department Inspector General Timothy Camus told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that the IRS had failed to look at its own storage facilities in West Virginia and Pennsylvania to see if the backup email tapes might be there.
It turns out that the emails were there - more than 32,000 of them, according to Camus, who unearthed the backups just two weeks before the hearing, and said investigators are still examining the emails.
Attorney Cleta Mitchell, representing the voter integrity group True the Vote in its lawsuit against the IRS, told The Daily Caller that the Justice Department knew all along that the emails were stored at the off-site facility and fought in court to keep a search from ever happening.
"We said in court that there are off-site servers where all IRS emails are stored," Mitchell told the DC.
DOJ lawyers representing the IRS and Camus said that Mitchell didn't have the authority as a lawyer to even discuss the existence of the storage facilities.
"The Department of Justice lawyers objected to that and said I shouldn't even be allowed to mention these off-site servers without sworn affidavits," Mitchell told the DC. "They meant that I was trying to testify to the judge without bringing in witnesses with sworn affidavits."
Mitchell even filed a motion in July to get approval for an independent forensic examination of the tapes held at IRS storage sites in New Martinsville, West Virginia, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but that motion was denied.
According to court transcripts obtained by the DC, Mitchell said that she was "advised that the IRS maintains servers that are in different states in different locations and that IRS employees are advised that their emails are never lost."
The court replied, "That's what I've been told as far as my emails here."
Mitchell continued, "And I have had individuals who worked with, for the IRS from all across the country who have communicated that to me."
"And they say - I hear from government employees, retired and active, who say what is being said is not possible. It is not plausible and it is contrary to what we are told as employees of the IRS."
