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  • REPORT: Lois Lerner’s IRS Hard Drive Was SHREDDED

    06.25.2015 | News | |

    House Republicans are considering impeaching IRS commissioner John Koskinen  for telling Congress last year that the email files of former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner were lost and could not be found when they were in fact destroyed.

    Lerner’s laptop crashed on June 2011 and was sent to a Hewlett-Packard IT technician. The technician determined that the hard drive more than likely crashed due to “an impact of some sort” like somebody hitting it or smashing it, according to testimony from the Treasury Inspector general’s investigation of the hard drive, which was submitted Thursday to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

    The IRS Criminal Investigation Division reportedly believed there were additional steps that could have been taken to attempt to recover data Lerner’s hard drive during that time, but IRS IT management told investigators that such an effort “was not worth the expense.”

    The hard drive was then shredded and its pieces were sold for scrap.

    “We determined by obtaining the certificate of destruction dated April 16, 2012, interviews with the facility manager, and a search of the facility, that this shipment of hard drives was destroyed using an AMERI-SHRED AMS-750HD shredder,” according to the inspector general J. Russell George’s testimony Thursday. “TIGTA agents observed the shredder in operation and noted that the shredder cut the inserted hard drives into quarter-sized pieces, and according to the facility manager, those pieces are then sold for scrap.”

    George goes on to note that IRS employees also erased the backup tapes of the server that housed Lerner’s e-mails in 2010 and 2011, though he says he “did not uncover evidence” of any conspiracy to obstruct the investigation.

    The IRS is in possession of thousands of Lerner emails discovered recently at a storage facility in West Virginia, yet the agency refuses to turn the emails over to the Oversight Committee.

    The IRS claims it’s still trying to “de-duplicate” the emails so that Oversight won’t have to sort through multiple copies of the same emails and “de-duplicating” Lerner’s emails will supposedly take a long time.

    Lawmakers have that cut the agency’s budget and held Lerner in contempt of Congress in hopes of speeding up the stagnant pace at which the agency has produced documents requested by the committee.

    Last October, publisher of the Daily Surge Jason Mattera, asked Lerner if she had any regrets for her role in the ongoing IRS corruption case and if she wanted to apologize to conservatives for using government to harass them.

    Lerner refused to answer Mattera’s questions, much like she refused to testify before Congress, ran away to a random person’s front yard and begged strangers to let her in their house.


    Alicia Powe

    Staff Writer

    Alicia Powe is a staff writer for Daily Surge. She worked in the War Room of the Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee and served as a White House Intern during the George W. Bush administration. Alicia has written for numerous outlets, including Human Events, Media Research Center and Townhall.com.

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