Lois Lerner Email Warned IRS Employees of Emails That ‘Can Be Seen By Congress’

◼ Lois Lerner, former director of the Exempt Organizations Unit at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), warned other IRS officials that lower-level employees “are not as sensitive as we are to the fact that anything we write can be public--or at least be seen by Congress,” according to documents obtained by Judicial Watch and released on Thursday. - CNS

In the latest batch of documents the IRS released to Judicial Watch under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which the agency heavily redacted before handing over, Lerner proposed training to help IRS employees “understand the pitfalls” of discussing “specific Congress people, practitioners and political parties” in emails that could be "seen by Congress" or the public.
“We are all a bit concerned about the mention of specific Congress people, practitioners and political parties. Our filed folks are not as sensitive as we are to the fact that anything we write can be public--or at least be seen by Congress,” Lerner wrote in an email to Holly Paz, former director of the IRS Office of Rulings and Agreements, on Feb. 16, 2012....

In June of 2014, the IRS informed Congress that it had lost two years worth of Lerner’s emails, which had been subpoenaed as part of the congressional investigation, due to a mid-2011 computer crash. However, it was revealed last November that investigators with the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) were able to recover more than 30,000 of the emails the IRS claimed were permanently lost.
Judicial watch filed a FOIA lawsuit on Feb. 18, 2015, demanding “any and all records related to the destruction of damaged hard drives from IRS employee computers from January 1, 2010, to the present.” KEEP READING