Investigators recover 32,000 emails in probe of IRS

WASHINGTON (AP) — Investigators said Thursday they have recovered 32,000 emails related to a former IRS official at the heart of the agency’s Tea Party scandal.

But they don’t know how many of them are new.

The emails were to and from Lois Lerner, who used to head the IRS division that processes applications for tax-exempt status. Last June, the IRS told Congress it had lost an unknown number of Lerner’s emails when her computer hard drive crashed in 2011.

At the time, IRS officials said the emails could not be recovered. But at a congressional hearing Thursday evening, investigators said they recovered thousands of emails from old computer tapes used to back up the agency’s email system.

“We recovered quite a number of emails but until we compare those to what’s already been produced we don’t know if they’re new emails,” Timothy Camus, a Treasury deputy inspector general for tax administration, told the House Oversight Committee.

Neither Camus nor the inspector general, J. Russell George, would describe the contents of any of the emails at Thursday’s hearing.

The IRS says it has already produced 78,000 Lerner emails, many of which have been made public by congressional investigators.

Camus said it took investigators two weeks to locate the computer tapes that contained Lerner’s emails. He said it took technicians about four months to find Lerner’s emails on the tapes.