IRS Watchdog Recovers 30,000 Missing Lois Lerner Emails

The Treasury Department’s watchdog agency for the Internal Revenue Service said it has found as many as 30,000 emails to and from Lois Lerner, the former head of the IRS nonprofits unit and the central figure in the controversy over the tax agency’s alleged targeting of conservative groups, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal report.

The IRS revealed in June that tens of thousands of Ms. Lerner’s messages sought by congressional investigators had been thought lost in a 2011 crash of her hard drive. The office of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration said Friday that it has recovered much of the communication from disaster recovery tapes.

In congressional testimony and court filings, IRS officials have said the agency tried without success to retrieve the emails but did not attempt to mine the backup tapes because they were routinely recycled and would contain only six months’ worth of data. The IRS said Friday that it “remains committed to fully cooperating” with the inquiries and has sent investigators more than 24,000 Lerner emails from before her hard drive failed.

Ms. Lerner retired from the IRS last year. She has been held in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify on her unit’s heightened scrutiny of political organizations applying for nonprofit status.