After Congressman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder on Wednesday inquiring the whereabouts of a former Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney and one-time Lois Lerner employee and Judicial Watch released new IRS emails on Thursday revealing a “secret research project” on donors to non-profit political groups, two more IRS bombshell broke on Friday. With these stories breaking today, the question is: Will the major broadcast networks cover these stories?
The first new piece of news was in the form of an article published on Friday afternoon by the Associated Press, which reported that the emails of five additional IRS employees under investigation by Congress have been lost.
Hours prior, Jordan wrote to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen saying that congressional staff have spoken with the Treasury’s Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) and were told that 760 IRS computer servers could exist and possibly contain e-mails belonging to Lerner that had been thought to be lost.
Of the five IRS employees whose emails were reported lost, the AP said that two of them worked at the infamous Cincinnati office “processing applications for tax-exempt status.” As in the situations of Lois Lerner and other IRS employees under investigation, the agency cited “computer crashes” as the reason “for the lost emails” and claimed that they found “no evidence that anyone deliberately destroyed evidence.”
The information from the TIGTA would confirm news from Judicial Watch on August 25 in which Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton appeared on the Fox News Channel (FNC) to announce that a DOJ attorney informed his organization that Lerner’s e-mails still exist despite previous reporting that they were permanently lost along when Lerner’s hard drive was damaged and destroyed.
Any coverage of these four developments would be the first time that the any of the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC mention the IRS scandal in over a month. The last time that any of the networks gave air time to this on-going story was on July 31 when all three covered news that Lois Lerner referred to conservatives as “—holes” and “crazies” during an email correspondence with a coworker in 2012.
