IRS: By the Way, We Destroyed Lois Lerner's BlackBerry After Targeting Questions Started

Photo Credit: TownHall

Photo Credit: TownHall

If you missed my piece yesterday on Lerner’s reportedly not missing emails, click through and spend five minutes catching up on the evolving timeline. The “official” story keeps shifting, so it’s important to track the changes. This week’s previous development was that a Justice Department attorney informed a watchdog group that all government emails are, in fact, archived, but that retrieving the messages “destroyed” by Lerner’s hard drive crash/scratch would be more trouble than it’s worth. Now we have another drip of damning information, courtesy of Fox News:

Lois Lerner’s Blackberry was intentionally destroyed after Congress had begun its probe into IRS targeting of conservative groups, a senior IRS lawyer acknowledged in a sworn declaration. Thomas Kane, Deputy Assistant Chief Counsel for the IRS, wrote in the declaration, part of a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch against the IRS, that the Blackberry was “removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012.” That date – June 2012 – is significant because by that time, ex-IRS official Lerner had already been summoned before congressional staffers who interviewed her about reports of the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups. “We had already talked to her. Our personal staff and Oversight Committee staff had sat down with Ms. Lerner and confronted her about information we were getting from conservative groups in the state of Ohio and around the country,” Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told Fox News.

Read more from this story HERE.