IRS emails discovered: backups found.

• Author: Suderman, Peter
• Position: Citings - Internal Revenue Service - Brief article

IN JUNE, as Congress probed the posssibility that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was targeting conservative nonprofits, the agency released a memo describing its search for email records related to the investigation. The memo documented steps taken and emphasized the breadth of the search.

The IRS had "never before undertaken a document production of this size and scope," the agency said. Deploying hundreds of employees, over 100,000 man-hours, and millions of dollars, it continued, the IRS had thoroughly searched for emails to and from Lois Lerner, the key figure in the inquiry. But the search was hampered, because Lemer's work computer had crashed in 2011. "The data stored on her computer's hard drive was determined at the time to be 'unrecoverable' by the IT professionals," the memo explained. "Any of Ms. Lerner's email that was only stored on that computer's hard drive would have been lost when the hard drive crashed and could not be...