"Judicial Watch announced that U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to report to him by June 29 the status of the recovery and release of emails of Lois Lerner and other IRS officials. The Court also ordered a court hearing, scheduling a status conference for July 1, 2015. The developments come in Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit seeking documents about the Obama IRS’s targeting and harassment of Tea Party and conservative opponents of President Obama (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. Internal Revenue Service (No. 1:13-cv-01559)).
On June 18, Judge Sullivan ordered the IRS to produce information about emails recovered by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), the internal IRS watchdog agency:
[F]ile a supplemental report, setting forth any new information regarding: (1) TIGTA’s recovery of emails from the backup tapes; (2) TIGTA’s production of emails to the IRS; (3) the IRS’s review of emails and production to the plaintiff; and (4) the status of the TIGTA investigation. This report shall be filed by no later than June 29, 2015.
The IRS had already responded to a prior June 4 Sullivan order requiring the IRS to provide answers by June 12 on the status of the Lerner emails the IRS had previously declared lost. Judge Sullivan issued the order after Judicial Watch raised questions about whether all of the emails recovered by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) had been turned over to the IRS, and if so, whether the IRS had duly processed the documents.
In its response filed June 12, the IRS declared it was in “the process of conducting further manual deduplication of the 6,400” emails, even though officials from TIGTA have stated they have already identified and removed emails that are duplicates. Contrary to previous agency claims that the emails were lost and unrecoverable, the IRS finally admits that it has as many as 6,400 new Lerner emails but won’t promise to release them to Judicial Watch yet. Even though TIGTA already identified and removed duplicative emails, the IRS is in “the process of conducting further manual deduplication of the 6,400” emails, rather than reviewing them in response to Judicial Watch’s FOIA requests that are more than two years old.
On June 15, Judicial Watch attorneys responded with a court filing that demanded that the IRS should stop stonewalling and turn over the records it says it now has:"
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