A senior IRS lawyer has said in a sworn declaration that Lois Lerner’s BlackBerry was intentionally destroyed after Congress had begun to investigate her involvement in IRS targeting of conservative groups.
The declaration came as part of a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch against the IRS, seeking to gain access to Lois Lerner’s emails. The BlackBerry had become a point of scrutiny after previous attempts to locate her emails were stymied by computer crashes and failed backups.
In the declaration, Thomas Kane, Deputy Associate Chief Counsel for the IRS, wrote that the BlackBerry was “removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012.”
By that point in time, Congress had already begun to investigate allegations that the IRS had targeted conservative groups, and Lerner had already been interviewed by congressional staff about the allegations, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, told FOX News.
The BlackBerry in question was issued to Lerner in November 2009, meaning its existence coincides with much of what House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.) has said are “the critical years of the targeting of conservative groups.”
A senior IRS IT officer said in a separate sworn declaration that “standard IRS practice and policy in the collection of electronic data does not include collecting data from Blackberry devices because the email of a Blackberry user is collected through the process of collecting the contents of the user’s Outlook mailbox files.”
Such files relevant to Lerner’s case are supposedly gone.
Lerner’s critics are suggesting that the destruction of the BlackBerry does more than raise further suspicions about her behavior.
“If you intentionally destroy evidence, that is a crime. If you make a statement in court saying the evidence is not available and it is, that is also a crime,” Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, told FOX News.
