About Those Missing #IRS Emails

From Kim Strassel, at the Wall Street Journal, "About Those Missing Emails" (at Memeorandum):

Lois Lerner's emails are lost, and they need finding. In the meantime, their very disappearance tells us that Congress is sniffing down the right trail.

A year into congressional investigations of IRS targeting, we know two things beyond a doubt. We know from the public record that starting in 2010 the most powerful leaders of the Democratic Party—President Obama, Senate chairmen, House Democrats—ran a ceaseless campaign pressuring the IRS to silence conservative groups. We also know from internal IRS emails that Ms. Lerner, the former head of exempt organizations, was at the epicenter of an agency effort to silence those very groups, in the precise same time frame.

What we don't know is the interaction between the two. The IRS's deliberate withholding for a year of Lerner emails allowed the press and liberals to crow that there was no "there" there—zero evidence of Lerner collusion with anybody in the Democratic Party. At the very worst, went the explanation, Ms. Lerner and her IRS pals were zealous bureaucrats, primed to crack down on campaign money, and therefore eager to interpret the Democratic campaign as an order to act.

But the alleged disappearance of Ms. Lerner's hard drive—and the fact that the missing conversations are those the former IRS director had with people outside the IRS—has suddenly resurrected, with force, the explosive possibility that she was chatting with Democrats who mattered.

There's plenty of reason to believe she was. Just last week Congress discovered (via a subpoena to the Justice Department) emails showing that Ms. Lerner had conversations with Justice prosecutors about investigating conservative nonprofits. Who else in the Obama administration was Ms. Lerner talking to?

Continue reading.

Also see Walter Olson, at CATO, "Kim Strassel and the WSJ on the Lost IRS Emails."