The IRS is dragging its feet on the court-ordered release of newly-discovered emails to and from Lois Lerner, the ex-agency official who allegedly targeted tea party groups seeking tax-exempt status, Tom Fitton, president of the government watchdog Judicial Watch, tells
Newsmax TV.
"The government found 1,400-plus new Lois Lerner emails. Remember those emails that were deleted and weren't recoverable on backup tapes? Well, they weren't deleted, they were recoverable and they were on backup tapes," Fitton said Friday on "The Steve Malzberg Show."
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"We've been fighting the administration to get access to those new emails. They wouldn't tell us when they were going to give them to us. Finally, there was a court hearing last week and Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the IRS to start turning over those emails once a week every Monday."
But that hasn't happened, according to Fitton, author of
"The Corruption Chronicles: Obama's Big Secrecy, Big Corruption, and Big Government," published by Threshold Editions.
"The soonest we're going to get them now is Wednesday of next week — two weeks after the judge said to turn them over once a week every Monday," Fitton tells Steve Malzberg.
"They think the court order doesn't apply to them evidently. I don't understand why they would take that risk with a federal court judge, but then again they've been obstructing the court from the get-go on the floor with the Lerner issue."
Fitton said other Lerner emails that have been released thus far are "astonishing."
"They provide an exhaustive account of a meeting that Lois Lerner and other IRS folks had with the Department of Justice.... It wasn't just the IRS stalling tea party applications, it was the Justice Department and the FBI talking about prosecuting these very groups," he said.
Lerner, who oversaw the IRS division that singled out the organizations, retired in September 2013 over the debacle. The Justice Department said in March that she would not be charged for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify about it.
In May 2014, the House of Representatives voted to hold Lerner in contempt for twice refusing to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Two months later, IRS officials told Judicial Watch, and the federal court judge hearing the group's FOIA case, that Lerner's email had crashed and that she might have lost all her emails.