WELL BLOW ME DOWN: Lerner’s Hard Drive “Crashed” 10 Days After 1st Inquiry About Targeting Conservatives

Did anyone involved in this actually think that this would go over smoothly? Here is the timeline of the IRS hard drive fiasco:

The timing is not merely suspicious, it is damning.

[T]he alleged disappearance of Ms. Lerner’s hard drive—and the fact that the missing conversations are those the former IRS director had with people outside the IRS—has suddenly resurrected, with force, the explosive possibility that she was chatting with Democrats who mattered.There’s plenty of reason to believe she was. Just last week Congress discovered (via a subpoena to the Justice Department) emails showing that Ms. Lerner had conversations with Justice prosecutors about investigating conservative nonprofits. Who else in the Obama administration was Ms. Lerner talking to?

I’m omitting all of the correspondence between Lerner and Congressional Democrats — but check the piece to refresh your memory.

Here’s the chronology of this “crash:”

As to Ms. Lerner’s behavior, consider that House Ways & Means Chairman Dave Camp first sent a letter asking if the IRS was engaged in targeting in June, 2011. Ms. Lerner denied it. She engineered a plant in an audience at a tax conference in May 2013 to drop the bombshell news about targeting (maybe hoping nobody would notice?). She has subsequently asserted a Fifth Amendment right to silence in front of the only people actually investigating the affair, Congress. Now we learn that her hard drive supposedly defied modernity and suffered total annihilation about 10 days after the Camp letter arrived.Is there something in those lost emails? The fact that they are “lost” at all probably answers that question.

This isn’t the only issue of suspicious timing in BOLOGate. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen knew in February that Lois Lerner’s hard drive had “crashed” — but did not inform Congress until last week.

Read more: ACE