Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan Demands IRS Explain the Lois Lerner Lost Emails

HOW WILL THE IRS REACT TO BEING ON THE OTHER SIDE OF A FEDERAL DEMAND?

Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court in Washington has ordered the IRS to explain under oath how former IRS employee Lois Lerner’s emails went missing. Do you mean a federal judge will not except the excuse, that the dog ate my hard drive? Imagine that, Lois Lerner warned IRS employee’s what they put in their emails and then her’s miraculously disappeared. Yup, not a smidgen of corruption here.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the IRS to detail under oath how some of former agency official Lois Lerner’s emails went missing, as well as any potential methods for recovering them.

Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court in Washington gave the Internal Revenue Service exactly a month — until Aug. 10 — to file a report, which he demanded as part of a lawsuit from a conservative watchdog, Judicial Watch, against the agency.

Judicial Watch is seeking a wide range of documents from the IRS, including Lerner’s emails, as part of a Freedom of Information Act request. It has complained that the IRS didn’t tell it that the agency couldn’t recover all of Lerner’s emails from 2009 to 2011.

Sullivan cast his ruling as a compromise, and a potential way for Judicial Watch to get answers without the court wading any deeper into the matter. Judicial Watch had asked the court to potentially compel IRS officials to testify about the lost emails, through a process called limited discovery.