A Smoking Gun? Emails Show Lois Lerner May Have Asked IRS Employees to Hide Information From Congress

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It was revealed today that in newly released emails from the House Oversight Committee, former IRS Director of Tax Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner showed that she was concerned about the contents of the IRS’s internal online communications system (OCS), which is similar to instant messaging, being searched by Congress.

The contents of the emails in question have Lerner asking if conversations that took place within the OCS system were regularly saved and if they could be part of a subpoena for by congressional investigators.

These emails were sent on April 9, 2013, just days after she learned that Congress would be looking into whether the IRS targeted conservative groups for denial of tax exempt status.

In the initial email, sent at 1:50 PM, Lerner asks Maria Hooke, an IRS technology employee, and Nanette Downing, the manager of the unit that evaluated the applications:

I had a question today about OCS. I was cautioning folks about email and how we have had several occasions where Congress has asked for emails and there has been an electronic search for responsive emails – so we need to be cautions about what we say in emails. Someone asked if OCS conversations were also searchable – I don’t know, but told them I would get back to them. Do you know?

A response by Hooke, at 2:45 PM, she states:

OCS messages are not set to automatically save as the standard; however the functionality exists within the software. That being said the parties involved in an OCS conversation can copy and save the contents of the conversation to an email or file.

To date OCS conversation are not specifically identified as part of the Electronic Data Request (EDR) for information, however, if one of the parties saved the conversation as an email or file they would become part of the electronic search.

My general recommendation is to treat the conversations as if it could/is begin saved somewhere, as it is possible for either party of the conversation to retain the information and have it turn up as part of an electronic search.

Make sense?

Lerner’s one word response, sent at 2:51 PM was:

Perfect

The House Oversight Committee has made copies of these emails available to the public.

This is an interesting revelation in the case, given that over two years of Lerner’s actual emails may have gone missing due to a “hard drive crash,” as claimed by IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. Some Republicans have questioned whether the IRS exhausted all efforts to try to recover the emails from the hard drive in 2011.