Fitton made the bombshell declaration during an appearance on Fox News:
“The Department of Justice attorney told the Judicial Watch attorney on Friday that it turns out the federal government backs up all computer records in case something terrible happens in Washington and there is a catastrophe. So the government can continue operating. They say it would be too hard to go get Lois Lerner’s e-mails from that back-up system.
“Everything we’ve been hearing about scratched hard drives, missing e-mails of Lois Lerner, other IRS officials, other officials in the Obama administration, it’s all been a pack of malarkey. They could get these records but they don’t want to and they haven’t told anyone about it, frankly, until we were able to get it out of them on Friday. There’s no such thing as Lois Lerner’s missing e-mails. It’s all been a big lie. They’ve been lying to the courts, to the American people and to Congress.”
Lerner’s hard drive has been the focus of the ongoing scandal involving the improper targeting of conservative groups based on political ideology. House Republicans have subpoenaed all email correspondence between Lerner and other governmental entities, including the White House. Current IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testified before the House Government Oversight Committee in June that the emails during the key period when the targeting occurred were “lost” due to a hard drive crash in 2011.
Judicial Watch has filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for all “missing” records from the same time period at the IRS.