When IRS bureaucrats decided to make life difficult for hundreds of Tea Party and conservative nonprofit applicants during the 2010 and 2012 campaigns, they frequently discussed their actions on government email accounts. They even discussed in some of those emails the need to be cautious about what sort of things they said digitally, knowing that congressional oversight investigators might someday request copies of their communications.

But Congress and nonprofit watchdogs have been unable to obtain emails from the critical time period of key IRS employees, most notably those of Lois Lerner, former head of the IRS division that approves nonprofit applications. Thanks to suspiciously well-timed computer malfunctions, these have been lost to history. Or have they?