Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Lois Lerner used two personal email accounts in addition to her official IRS email


Morgan Chalfant reports at freebeacon.com,
Ex-IRS official Lois Lerner used a second personal email account under the name of “Toby Miles” to conduct official business during the time of the conservative group targeting scandal.

The Washington Times reported that the IRS admitted Monday in a court filing that Lerner used not one but two personal email accounts in addition to her official IRS email during her time heading the government agency’s Exempt Organizations Unit.

According to IRS lawyer Geoffrey J. Klimas, the agency discovered the email account when it was assembling documents to turn over to Judicial Watch, the public interest law group that filed an open-records lawsuit to gain access to emails sent by Lerner during the time she targeted conservative groups seeking tax exempt status.

“In addition to emails to or from an email account denominated ‘Lois G. Lerner’ or ‘Lois Home,’ some emails responsive to Judicial Watch’s request may have been sent to or received from a personal email account denominated ‘Toby Miles,’” Klimas explained to District Judge Emmet Sullivan Monday.

While it remains unclear who is “Toby Miles”–Lerner is married to a Michael Miles–the IRS said that it has concluded that the address represents “a personal email account used by Lerner.”

“It is simply astonishing that years after this scandal erupted we are learning about an account Lois Lerner used that evidently hadn’t been searched,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said, accusing the IRS of concealing information from Lerner that could inform the targeting controversy.

...A bipartisan Senate Finance Committee report released earlier this month concluded that Lerner “failed to adequately manage” members of her staff processing the applications from conservative groups seeking tax exempt status for two years beginning in 2010.

As a result of the “delinquent” handling of such applications, only one conservative advocacy group was granted tax-exempt status in a three-year period.
Read more here.

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