Lois Lerner email: Some in GOP ‘crazies’

Ex-IRS official Lois Lerner refers to some Republicans as “a—holes” and “crazies” in an exchange from 2012, according to emails released by House Republicans on Wednesday.

“Maybe we are through if there are that many a—holes,” the former head of the IRS tax-exempt division wrote in an exchange with an unnamed non-IRS official, dated Nov. 9, 2012. Later she added: “We don’t need to worry about alien terrorists. It’s our own crazies that will take us down.”

Although Lerner doesn’t say “Republican” or “conservative” in the particular emails, she and the unnamed person were discussing conservative talk radio hosts.

Lerner, through her lawyer, maintains her innocence, and the new seemingly personal exchange does not prove that she allowed bias to infiltrate her job, merely that she had a number of opinions. Earlier emails released by the panel suggested she was a Democrat.

She is again topping headlines after the IRS last month told Congress that it lost two years’ worth of her emails in a 2011 computer crash, stifling congressional investigators who wanted to read all her correspondence in search of a smoking gun. Lerner has denied suggestions by Republicans that she intentionally crashed her computer.

Republicans say the new emails further their argument that Lerner — whose division singled out tea party groups seeking tax breaks for additional scrutiny — was biased, arguing in a news release that the exchange “directly demonstrates Ms. Lerner’s deep animus towards conservatives.” Democrats have called the relentless focus by the GOP a partisan witch hunt.

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