Lois Lerner emails expose secretive IRS warnings

Former director of Exempt Organizations Unit at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Lois Lerner is reported as warning other IRS officials to manage the lower-level employees written conversations in 2013.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Lerner resigned from the IRS in 2013 after being accused of leading the Exempt Organizations Unit into unfairly targeting conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status between 2010 and 2012. In 2014, the IRS reported it had lost two years worth of Lerner's emails because of a 2011 computer crash.

However, in November of 2014, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) revealed they recovered "more than 30,000 of the emails the IRS claimed were permanently lost," according to CNS News.

Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit in February 2015, demanding copies of "any and all records related to the destruction of damaged hard drives from IRS employee computers from January 1, 2010, to the present."

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Among these records was a specific email from Lerner sent in February 2012.

The lower-level employees "are not as sensitive as we are to the fact that anything we write can be public--or at least be seen by Congress," she emailed to Holly Paz, former director of the IRS Office of Rulings and Agreements. "We are all a bit concerned about the mention of specific Congress people, practitioners and political parties. Our filed folks are not as sensitive as we are to the fact that anything we write can be public--or at least be seen by Congress."

"We talked with Nan [Nanette Downing, director of the Exempt Organizations (EO) Examinations Unit] and she thought it would be great if R & A could put together some training points to help them understand the potential pitfalls, as well as how to think about referrals," continued Lerner.

The email also mentions by name, Tom Miller, EO technical adviser, Judy Kindell and Sharon Light, two of Lerner's advisers.

"As a starting point, Nan has sent up a bunch of papers that I asked Tom Miller to review to provide feedback to Sharon/Judy -- or whomever we decide should draft the training. I realize everyone is very busy, but I'd like you and Tom to get together to work out a reasonable plan for completing the review and reporting back on some of the issues he thinks we'd need to cover. If you need more info, we can talk," Lerner wrote.

After Paz replied the next day saying she believed something similar to what Lerner was discussing was already scheduled for the next month, Lerner replied, "I don't want to wait to [sic] long."

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Here is a link to the Judicial Watch Document page - http://www.judicialwatch.org/document-archive/lerner-irs-emails-production/

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