Just when it might appear that the IRS scandal cannot descend any lower, it has taken on the distinct odor of the Watergate cover-up with the most politically convenient computer crash in history. Naturally, the Obama administration waited to release the damaging news on Friday afternoon to minimize its impact. The alleged crash means the federal tax agency can only produce copies of emails to and from Lois Lerner and other IRS employees for the period January 2009 to April 2011. So all emails Lerner sent during that period from her official IRS account to anybody outside the agency — like the White House, the Justice Department, the Federal Election Commission, Democrats in Congress or political activists in liberal nonprofits — have vanished into a digital black hole.
The period involved just happens to be when Lerner and others in the Obama administration and key Senate Democrats hatched and began carrying out the targeting and harassment of Tea Party and conservative nonprofit applicants during the 2010 and 2012 campaigns. Included in the targeting and harassment was the illegal sharing of confidential tax information with individuals outside of the IRS. It also involved an attempt to gin up a political prosecution of doubtful merit by the Department of Justice against selected critics of President Obama.
