Lois Lerner, former Director of Exempt Organizations at the IRS and not a shady figure in the least, freaked out to a colleague about Congress monitoring the content of agency emails, a new document shows.
Dated April 9, 2013, just weeks before the IRS scandal really broke loose with the issuance of an inspector general report and the Great Committee Hearing Extravaganza of the Century, Lerner inquired about the storage of content transmitted via an intraoffice messaging system, “OCS,” to fellow IRSer Maria D. Hooke.
“I was cautioning folks about email and how we have had several occasions where Congress has asked for emails and there has been an electronic search for responsive emails–so we need to be cautious about what we say in emails,” Lerner wrote in a sentence that someone doubtlessly will still try to spin as unsuspicious. “Someone asked if OCS conversations were also searchable–I don’t know, but told them I would get back to them.”
Hooke, whose name is quite hard to track down through Google, appears to be the “Director, Business Systems Planning, Tax Exempt and Government Entities” at the IRS as of 2014. According to an IRS manual, the Business Systems Planning division is responsible for, among other services, providing “infrastructure, technology and security support.”
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee member Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) discussed the Lerner email — presumably never lost, and now found! — with current IRS lackey John Koskinen on Wednesday. As most conversations about the IRS scandal with officials not named “J. Russell George” have gone, it was unfruitful, but not too contentious.
A link to the Lerner exchange with Hooke is here, via the committee.
Humorously and slightly related, it was also reported Wednesday that Lerner indeed printed “some” of her emails.
