Judicial Watch representative Chris Farrell joined Kimberly Guilfoyle tonight on Justice with Judge Jeanine. Farrell announced that Judicial Watch has forced the IRS to court on July 10, 2014. This came after the IRS withheld information from the courts on the conservative targeting scandal.
“We’ve been involved in litigation for months now. In fact, the revelations that have come about are because of our litigation to force the IRS to produce records… They never mentioned to us or the court about the supposedly lost emails. So, we forced them into court. They need to appear on July 10… The real problem with the IRS in this case is they’ve been in communication with the court and they have never told the court about these missing or lost emails. So they’ve made what appear to be false and misleading statements to the court about the records themselves and how they’re producing them to us. They’ve pinned themselves in a corner. They are in real trouble.”
The court granted Judicial Watch a hearing over the missing IRS emails on July 10.
Judicial Watch today filed a Motion for Status Conference in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia to confer about the emails of Lois Lerner and other IRS officials, which were the subject of longstanding Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and a lawsuit, and which the IRS now claims to have “lost” (Judicial Watch v. IRS (No. 1:13-cv–1559)). U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan almost immediately granted our request and ordered a federal court hearing on the missing IRS emails be set for July 10!
The emails Judicial Watch has sought since May 2013 cover portions of the same period for which the IRS on June 13, 2014, notified the House Committee on Ways and Means were lost or destroyed. Yet, as we informed the Judge Sullivan today, the IRS failed to notify either Judicial Watch or the court concerning the “lost” emails:
Plaintiff’s FOIA requests and the Committee’s request indisputably seek the same emails of Lois Lerner and the other IRS officials, including Nikole Flax, from January 1, 2010 to the present. Despite the obvious relevance, IRS has still not notified the Court or Plaintiff of the destruction of emails and whether the same issues relating to production of emails of Lois Lerner or the other six IRS officials exist in this lawsuit. Plaintiff only learned of the destroyed records on June 13, 2014, when the news media reported on the existence of IRS’s letter to Congress about the status of the emails.
