IRS Says Techs Labored to Fix Lois Lerner’s Hard Drive

The Internal Revenue Service asserted in court filings Monday that its technical staff made repeated but unsuccessful attempts to recover data from ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s crashed hard drive, Bloomberg writes.

In a series of sworn statements, government technicians described step-by-step their efforts to salvage material from the malfunctioning drive, which has become central in the dispute over alleged IRS targeting of Tea Party organizations seeking nonprofit status. A federal judge hearing a suit brought last year by conservative activist group Judicial Watch had ordered the tax agency to detail its efforts to retrieve the data.

The IRS disclosed in June that it had lost thousands of emails to and from Ms. Lerner when her computer crashed in 2011. Congressional investigators were seeking the correspondence in connection with the Tea Party scandal, about which Ms. Lerner, the former head of the IRS nonprofits unit, has refused to testify.