Lost IRS Emails Found, Belying 'No Backup' Claims

The new Republican House and Senate will have more evidence to look at in the IRS Tea Party targeting scandal now that thousands of Lois Lerner's "lost" emails have been found.

An inspector general with the Treasury Department located 30,000 of the emails on disaster recovery tapes.

Last spring, the IRS told Congress that two years' worth of emails from Lerner, the woman at the center of the scandal, had been lost in a hard drive crash.

The missing emails corresponded with the period during which the IRS blocked the tax-exempt status for dozens of conservative groups in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election.

"We knew the Obama administration's bizarre claim that the emails were unrecoverable, deleted, not backed up, crashed, and on and on was just flat false," Matthew Clark, an associate counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice, wrote.

"It's taken our work, the demands of the American people, and congressional oversight to cut through this small part of the pattern of deception," Clark said.

So far it's not clear what's in the batch of emails that was just unearthed. But in previously discovered emails, Lerner used slurs showing her personal disdain for conservatives.