Better in their words…

Kimberley A. Strassel – June 19, 2014 7:33 p.m. ET

Lois Lerner’s emails are lost, and they need finding. In the meantime, their very disappearance tells us that Congress is sniffing down the right trail.

A year into congressional investigations of IRS targeting, we know two things beyond a doubt. We know from the public record that starting in 2010 the most powerful leaders of the Democratic Party—President Obama, Senate chairmen, House Democrats—ran a ceaseless campaign pressuring the IRS to silence conservative groups. We also know from internal IRS emails that Ms. Lerner, the former head of exempt organizations, was at the epicenter of an agency effort to silence those very groups, in the precise same time frame.

What we don’t know is the interaction between the two. The IRS’s deliberate withholding for a year of Lerner emails allowed the press and liberals to crow that there was no “there” there—zero evidence of Lerner collusion with anybody in the Democratic Party. At the very worst, went the explanation, Ms. Lerner and her IRS pals were zealous bureaucrats, primed to crack down on campaign money, and therefore eager to interpret the Democratic campaign as an order to act.

But the 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?

Or consider the extraordinary interaction between congressional Democrats and the IRS. Some of it was in a recent complaint filed to the Senate Ethics Committee by the Center for Competitive Politics against nine Democratic senators. It details their many letters and statements (that we know of) demanding the IRS shut down specific organizations that posed a threat to their Democratic House and Senate majority in the 2010 election.

Sen. Carl Levin, the head of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, exchanged at least 12 letters (that we know about) with the IRS in 2012 alone. IRS officials, including Ms. Lerner, met with Sen. Levin’s staff in 2013. And former IRS Acting Commissioner Stephen Miller testified that the IRS acted in part because Sen. Levin was “complaining bitterly” to the agency. In what forums? Were email conversations also taking place, behind the scenes, between the Levin office and Ms. Lerner and other IRS officials?

We do know that email conversations were common. A new and comprehensive House Oversight Committee report this week—about how politics drove the IRS affair—reveals fascinating details about just how chummy Democratic staff was with the IRS.

Here we find a staffer for Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin in October 2010 emailing no less than the IRS chief of staff, Jonathan Davis (who he addresses in familiar terms), with a heads up about a Durbin letter to the IRS commissioner demanding an investigation of Crossroads GPS, a conservative group. “We’re not the first to ask, of course,” the staffer acknowledges in the email. A few months later, Ms. Lerner asked her staff why it hadn’t taken action against Crossroads.

Here we also find staff from Sen. Chuck Schumer in March 2012 tipping off an IRS employee to a coming New York Times article about nonprofits, a tip that was passed to Ms. Lerner. This is the same Sen. Schumer who has been open in public speeches about the need for Democrats to use the IRS to crack down on the “extraordinary influence” of Tea Party groups (as he was quoted as saying in January 2014). When did he first start looking to use the IRS this way, and who did he talk to there?

We have emails suggesting that IRS staff aided Sen. Levin in putting together his letters of complaint to the IRS. We have staff for House Democrat Elijah Cummings asking the IRS for information to use in Mr. Cummings’s campaign against a specific conservative organization, True the Vote. Ms. Lerner got involved in that one—querying her staff as to whether they’d helped Mr. Cummings.

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.

Write to kim@wsj.com.

Kim Strassel: About Those Missing Emails – WSJ.