That headline is absolute bull. Those tapes were under subpoena and the IRS was under order to preserve them. You can bet Lois is going to get away with it and no one at the IRS will face any punishment for erasing the emails. This, plus the SC's ruling on RobertsCare, is the news of the day and they both make me sick and angry.

"WASHINGTON—Thousands of missing emails from former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner, a central focus of lawmakers’ probes into the alleged targeting of tea-party groups starting in early 2010, were lost when backup digital tapes were erased last year, the agency’s inspector general has found in an investigation.

The emails were first lost when Ms. Lerner—then the head of the tax-exempt division of the IRS—suffered a hard-drive crash in mid-2011.

Investigators had hoped to find the missing emails in backup tapes.

Now it turns out that 422 backup tapes from the crucial period were routinely erased by IRS workers. The tapes were destroyed in March 2014, according to the Treasury inspector general for the IRS, J. Russell George. That is long after lawmakers started trying to obtain all of Ms. Lerner’s emails, and long after the IRS issued instructions for employees to cease routine destruction of documents that might relate to the probes.

The finding means that much of the mystery surrounding alleged IRS targeting of tea party groups likely will continue. It could also raise difficult new questions for IRS managers, including Commissioner John Koskinen.

“There was a [document] preservation order in place” that the IRS “never complied with,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah), the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, at a hearing on Thursday morning. “They destroyed evidence. That’s what they did.”

The tapes could contain as many as 24,000 additional emails, Mr. George said in prepared testimony for the hearing.

Mr. George’s probe also showed that the IRS didn't search for several potential sources of emails, including the backup tapes, after the hard-drive crash became known. Even some Democrats said they were troubled.

“I’m concerned too as to why things were not looked into,” said Rep. Elijah Cummings (D., Md.), the top Democrat on the panel. “That really does concern me.”

The IRS didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. "

http://www.wsj.com/articles/former-irs-o...ased-1435234390