Internal Revenue Service officials moved to create a training program in order to limit the release of information to Congress, documents released Thursday by the advocacy group Judicial Watch appear to show.
The conservative watchdog organization won release of a batch of internal documents via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the IRS, including one document that appears to show the protagonist in the IRS scandal cautioning against too much disclosure in the face of a gathering political storm.
In an email, Lois Lerner, the embattled director of the Exempt Organizations division, tells a colleague that field-level IRS employees “are not as sensitive as we are to the fact that anything we write can be public--or at least be seen by Congress.”
The email goes on to note that another IRS executive had been tasked with putting “together some training points to help them understand the potential pitfalls” of disclosing too much to Congress.
To conservative groups, the email smelled like a call to cover-up information.
“These new emails show that the IRS scandal is not over,” Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said in a statement, adding that the document “point to document gaps caused by the refusal of the Obama IRS to search for Lois Lerner’s emails.”
In a separate and long email released Thursday, Lerner complains that the controversy over a “Be On the Lookout” list for Tea Party groups and other conservative organizations has overshadowed her division’s work. Lerner said she understood “why the criteria might raise questions” about political targeting, and figuratively falls on her sword, sort of.
“I am willing to take the blame for not having provided sufficient direction initially, which may have resulted in front line staff doing things that appeared to be politically motivated, but I am not on board that anything that occurred here shows that the IRS was politically motivated in the actions taken,” said Lerner.
As the political storm around Lerner grew after the May 2013 disclosure that the IRS inappropriately scrutinized conservative organizations, Lerner famously declared her innocence before a congressional panel, then refused to answer questions. Months later, the IRS disclosed that Lerner’s computer hard drive had failed and her Blackberry messages had been deleted and lost.
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