Report: DOJ Says Lerner's E-mails Were Backed Up

On Monday’s “The Real Story” on the Fox News Channel, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton claimed that an attorney from the U.S. Justice Department told Judicial Watch that IRS official Lois Lerner’s emails were backed up, but it is “too hard” to recover them. 

“The Department of Justice attorney told the Judicial Watch attorney on Friday that it turns out the federal government backs up all computer records in case something terrible happens in Washington, and there is a catastrophe so the government can continue operating. And they say it would be too hard to go get Lois Lerner’s e-mails from that back-up system,” he said.

Fitton added, “We want to know why they hadn’t told the court about this back-up system. If this back-up system is working, Lois Lerner’s emails are there. There are half-a-dozen other IRS officials whose emails have supposedly disappeared as well…we’ve been led to believe that once they disappear they can’t be found again, when in fact they back up everything, as most people suspected. Now the government has confirmed, and we’re going to ask the judge in this case for relief.” 

Previously, former EPA official Richard Greene wrote “anything I did with my computer or Blackberry device would result in a permanent record being created.” And, “Any notion that I could just erase something after it had been sent was conclusively dashed when the hard drive inside my desktop computer in my office crashed … I explained to [the IT person] that my concern was that all my data, including email that I often searched through, was on that drive and could be lost.  His reply was to assure me that every stroke of my keyboard had been backed up multiple times in the local office and off site as well, and nothing would be lost.”

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