It’s
not just Lois Lerner’s e-mails. The Internal Revenue Service says it can’t
produce e-mails from six more employees involved in the targeting of
conservative groups, according to two Republicans investigating the scandal.
The
IRS recently informed Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp and subcommittee
chairman Charles Boustany that computer crashes resulted in additional lost
e-mails, including from Nikole Flax, the chief of staff to former IRS
commissioner Steven Miller, who was fired in the wake of the targeting scandal.
The
revelation about Lerner’s e-mails rekindled the targeting scandal and today’s
news has further inflamed Republicans. Camp and Boustany are now demanding a
special prosecutor to investigate “every angle” of the events that led to Lois
Lerner’s revelation in May 2013 that the agency had used inappropriate criteria
to review the applications for tax exemption.
The
lawmakers expressed particular outrage that the agency has known since
February that it would not be able to produce the e-mails requested by the
committee yet did not apprise the committee of that fact, and they charged in a
statement that the IRS is attempting to “cover up the fact that it convenient
lost key documents in the investigation.”
If
Lerner is the central figure in the scandal — Oversight Committee chairman
Darrell Issa said Monday evening he believes she was the senior-most official
involved — Flax may be an important auxiliary figure. E-mails produced in
response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the group Judicial Watchshow Flax giving the green light to
Lerner’s request to meet with Department of Justice officials to explore the
possibility of criminally prosecuting nonprofit groups — at the suggestion of
Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse — for engaging in political activity
after declaring on their application for nonprofit status that they had no
plans to do so.
E-mails
uncovered by the committee last week showed that, in preparation for her
meeting with the Department of Justice, Lerner and one of her advisers
transmitted 1.1 million pages of data on nonprofit groups, including
confidential taxpayer information, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
potentially in violation of federal law.
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