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Press Release Published: Jun 17, 2014

Oversight Subpoenas Lerner Hard Drive, Documents Related to “Lost” Emails

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House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., today subpoenaed Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner John Koskinen for documents related to the recent revelation that the IRS supposedly “lost” former IRS official Lois Lerner’s emails for a two year period, January 2009 to April 2011. The subpoena covers Lerner’s hard drive and electronic devices as well as documents connected to the IRS’s response to Congress.

“After a year of beating down efforts by the Obama Administration and its allies to obstruct an investigation into targeting, the IRS now says it lost perhaps the most critical evidence,” said Issa. “When Commissioner Koskinen testified before the Committee in February, he made no mention of this.  It was only earlier this month, during an interview with a Justice Department official, that the Oversight Committee learned about the existence of subpoenaed 2010 Lerner e-mails that the IRS had not produced.  While this apparently forced the IRS to cough up an admission, we still do not have answers about how and why the IRS tried to deceive Congress about these missing e-mails.  This subpoena seeks those answers.”

Yesterday, the Committee subpoenaed Koskinen to testify before the Oversight Committee on Monday, June 23, 2014, at 7:00 p.m.  The subpoena comes as a result of the agency’s recent statement that the IRS lost an unknown number of emails pertaining to the activities of former IRS official Lois Lerner from January 2009 to April 2011. It also comes on the heels of the IRS’s repeated empty promises of compliance with oversight.

Below are the items subpoenaed by the Oversight Committee today:

    1. All back-up tapes, external drives, thumb drives, or other storage media the IRS used to capture, archive, back up, or otherwise record e-mails sent or received by Lois Lerner from January 1, 2009, to September 23, 2013.
    2. All hard drives, external drives, thumb drives, and computers Lois G. Lerner used from January 1, 2009, to September 23, 2013.
    3. All electronic communication devices the IRS issued to Lois G. Lerner from January 1, 2009, to September 23, 2013.
    4. All electronic files, including, but not limited to, .pst files, relating to the IRS e-mail account Lois G. Lerner used from January 1, 2009, to September 23, 2013.
    5. All documents and communications that Lois G. Lerner printed and/or stored for Federal Records Act compliance purposes from January 1, 2009 to September 23, 2013.
    6. All documents and communications referring or relating to the production to any congressional committee or Member of Congress of e-mail communications sent or received by Lois G. Lerner from January 1, 2009, to August 2, 2013.
    7. All documents and communications referring or relating to the creation of “Enclosure 3” from the June 13, 2014 letter from Leonard Oursler to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden and Ranking Member Orrin Hatch, entitled “Description of IRS Email Collection and Production” (enclosed herein).
    8. All documents and communications between or among IRS employees and employees of any Executive Branch entity referring or relating to the IRS’s production of documents to Congress from May 10, 2013, to the present.
    9. All documents and communications referring or relating to the subpoena issued by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew on August 2, 2013.
    10. All documents and communications referring or relating to the subpoena issued by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen on February 14, 2014.