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发帖数: 29846 | 1 By Mark Tapscott | July 1, 2014 | 5:04 pm
IRS attorneys will be even busier than normal next week, because another
federal judge has told them to show up in court July 11 to defend the
federal tax agency.
They will have to explain to U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton why the
IRS shouldn't be required to let an outside expert evaluate whether emails
on the computer hard drives of former IRS official Lois Lerner and six
colleagues really are lost forever, as the agency recently told Congress.
Responding to a motion filed Monday by True the Vote, a Houston-based
conservative nonprofit at the center of IRS targeting during the 2010 and
2012 campaigns, Walton issued an order Tuesday to hear arguments next week.
The IRS recently told Congress that a mysterious crash of the hard drives
last year irretrievably destroyed nearly two years of emails to and from
Lerner and the others to and from people in other federal agencies,
including the White House.
But True the Vote wants a digital forensics expert from outside the IRS to
assess the evidence.
“Even if the ill-timed hard drive ‘crash’ was truly an accident, and even
if the IRS genuinely believes that the emails are ‘unrecoverable,’ the
circumstances of the spoliation at issue cry out for a second opinion,”
True the Vote's attorneys told Walton in the motion filed late Monday.
“It may well prove to be the case that a computer forensics expert could
recover evidence that the IRS has been unable to retrieve.
"At the very least, such an expert could preserve whatever evidence has not
already been wiped clean from the IRS’s computers along with whatever is
stored on the Individual Defendants’ home computers, cell phones, and other
PDAs.”
IRS attorneys will be in the federal District Court on July 10 to explain
why the government failed to tell Judicial Watch about the lost emails for
months despite their being evidence in the nonprofit's Freedom of
Information Act lawsuit.
Judicial Watch, a government watchdog nonprofit, filed its lawsuit last
October after IRS officials failed to respond adequately to a May 2013 FOIA
request for the Lerner emails.
The government asked Walton on Monday night to dismiss the motion for an
outside digital forensics expert. But True the Vote argued that merely
asking for the dismissal “does not give them carte blanche to destroy or
permit the destruction of documents and discoverable information that are
relevant to the IRS Targeting Scheme in general and the application of True
the Vote for exempt status.
“If the IRS’s public statements about ‘recycling’ Ms. Lerner’s hard
drive are true, that alone establishes spoliation of evidence that violates
federal statutes and regulations, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and
professional ethics and responsibility.
“These statements, coupled with the refusal of Defendants’ counsel, to
provide any assurances about what has been and will be done to preserve
evidence underscore the need for the relief that True the Vote seeks."
An IRS spokesman has been asked for comment on True the Vote's motion and
the July 11 court date. |
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