Chaffetz: Lois Lerner Emails Destroyed in a Conscious Effort to Avoid Subpoena

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CHAFFETZ: “Are you or are you not going to provide this committee the e-mails as indicated in this subpoena? Yes or no?”
KOSKINEN: “We are -- I've never said we –“
CHAFFETZ: “I’m asking you yes or no.”
KOSKINEN: “We are going to respond to the subpoena.”
CHAFFETZ: “No, no. Sir, it's --" 
KOSKINEN: “Yes. We are going to respond to the subpoena.”
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KELLY: “Well, that was IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testifying before the House Oversight Committee in March of last year, telling Congressman Jason Chaffetz that the IRS had located a number of the Lois Lerner e-mails about the targeting of Conservative groups and would provide them to Congress. Just today we learned that three weeks before Koskinen made that claim to Congress, someone at the IRS had destroyed tens of thousands of those very e-mails despite an explicit order to preserve all of them, and the subpoena to hold on to and then produce them. Joining us now, Congressman Jason Chaffetz, who is now Chairman of the House Oversight Committee. Good to see you tonight, Mr. Chairman. Do you believe he was lying, or he just didn’t know what was going on in his organization when he told you that?”
CHAFFETZ: “According to what we've heard in the testimony today from the inspector general, an independent group, what he said was false. It was not true. Remember, it was Super Bowl Sunday in 2014 when the president said there’s not even a smidgen — not even a smidgen of evidence that there’s anything nefarious going on here, not even a smidgen. That same day, the IRS documents supposedly internally that they might be missing e-mails. But it was 30 days after that that they actually destroyed this evidence and then he came 22 days later to Congress and in my questioning he testified that they would provide us all of the e-mails. But they had just destroyed them.”
KELLY: “And the deputy inspector — the inspector general is the one who told you about this. They watch over the IRS. And the deputy inspector general came out and said this is an unbelievable set of circumstances. How do they explain — an innocent mistake? Some guy with a magnet sat up against the tapes? What are they saying?”
CHAFFETZ: “It happened the same day — they said they were missing e-mails the same day the president said that they were –- that there wasn't even a smidgen of evidence. Remember, go back to 2011 –-“
KELLY: “Your point is they were — that’s because they were destroying the evidence back at the IRS headquarters at the moment.”
CHAFFETZ: “Well, literally it was 30 days later that that evidence, despite a subpoena, despite an order to preserve that evidence that had been issued seven months prior, they destroyed that evidence.”
KELLY: “But the inspector general came out today and said that there was no direct evidence that the tapes were destroyed to hide information from Congress.”
CHAFFETZ: “They cannot definitively prove that somebody made the order to destroy that evidence as a conscious effort to avoid the subpoena. But the reality is, the fact pattern is such that they did destroy the evidence; there was a subpoena in place.”