IRS Destroys Lerner’s Blackberry During Congressional Tea Party Probe

More proof of criminal wrongdoing by IRS

The Internal Revenue Service destroyed former director Lois Lerner’s Blackberry, which contained the same e-mails as her hard drive the agency wiped, even though a Congressional inquiry into the IRS’s harassment of Tea Party groups was well underway.

The IRS never made any attempt to back up Lerner’s Blackberry before destroying it, and the agency even admitted the Blackberry “was removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012,” months after Congress began investigating allegations that the tax agency was purposely harassing conservative and libertarian groups applying for 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status.

“There is no record of any attempt by any IRS IT employee to recover data from any Blackberry device assigned to Lois Lerner in response to the Congressional investigations or this investigation,” Stephen Manning, Deputy Chief Information Officer for Strategy & Modernization, said according to the New York Observer.

The Blackberry was linked to Lerner’s official IRS e-mail account and thus contained the same e-mails Congress was seeking from her hard drive, which was likewise destroyed by the IRS a year prior to the destruction of the Blackberry.

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