In 2013, Lois Lerner, former head of the IRS non-profit section, pleaded the Fifth Amendment before the House Oversight Committee. She had been called to testify about her division’s unjustifiable harassment of conservative applicants for nonprofit status.

Just over a year later, it was reported that a number of Lerner’s work emails had gone missing due to a supposed problem with her hard drive. Then last month, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration testified that IRS employees — despite being under explicit orders not to destroy records — had “magnetically erased” as many as 24,000 of Lerner’s missing emails from hundreds of data tapes where they were being stored.