IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said Wednesday the two unnamed employees who destroyed thousands of emails belonging to Lois Lerner, former head of the tax-exempt unit, kept their jobs at the agency.
During his impeachment hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, Koskinen said the two officials had committed an “honest mistake” by wiping 422 back-up tapes believed to contain Lerner’s emails in 2014. The emails had been requested under a congressional subpoena during the investigation into the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups.
“The IG’s investigation found that they were not aware” of the subpoena, Koskinen said of the employees who scrubbed Lerner’s records.
Republicans on the judiciary panel slammed Koskinen for testifying in 2014 that he would provide all of Lerner’s emails despite the fact that those records had already been erased at the time of his testimony.
“I couldn’t tell the Congress things I didn’t know,” the IRS commissioner said.
Conservatives in the House are pushing leadership to allow a vote on formal articles of impeachment for Koskinen given his handling of the congressional investigation into IRS targeting.
