...the former head of the IRS Exempt Unit. She is a past president of the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws and a member of the Massachussetts bar. She was held in contempt of Congress for her role in the IRS targeting of regime political enemies and refusing to testify. The dog ate her computer's hard drive with all her emails on it..., the agency seems to acknowledge having needlessly solicited donor lists from non-profit political groups. According to a May 21, 2012, memo from the IRS Deputy Associate Chief Counsel: "such information was not needed across-the-board and not used in making the agency's determination on exempt status." Later, in her May 10, 2013, remarks in which Lerner first revealed in response to question she planted about the IRS targeting of conservative groups, she conceded that the requests for donor names was "not appropriate, not usual." The new documents obtained by Judicial Watch also reveal that 75% of the groups from whom the lists were solicited were apparently conservative, with only 5% being liberal.
The documents came in response to an October 2013 Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. Internal Revenue Service (No. 1:13-cv-01559)) filed against the IRS after the agency refused to respond to four FOIA requests dating back to May, 2013. The emails are contained in the sixth batch of documents the IRS has been forced to produce in response to the Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit.