As a taxpayer, do you think you could get away with assigning a legally blind accountant to prepare your returns? Then tell federal agents all of your supporting documentation had been recycled?

That’s apparently what happened during the investigation into Lois Lerner’s “missing” emails.

Stephen Manning, the deputy chief information officer for strategy and modernization at the IRS, submitted an affidavit in the True the Vote vs. IRS case in which he described his method to find the “lost” communications.

J. Christian Adams found something shocking on page 14:

“According to the Specialist, prior to joining the Internal Revenue Service … training was completed through Lions World Services for the Blind.”

IRS affidavitAccording to Adams, “the government confirmed that the IRS employee searching for the lost data was legally blind.”

Additional new information is casting doubt on the IRS’s other claims.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee published an excerpt of an email from Lois Lerner to her colleagues in which she expressed skepticism.

“No one will ever believe that both your hard drive and mine crashed within a week of each other! Life is strange,” Lerner wrote to David Fish, acting manager of IRS Exempt Organizations Technical Guidance and Quality Assurance, and Nikole Flax, then IRS Chief of Staff.

Backup tapes containing Lerner’s emails, in fact, were discovered in an off-site storage facility in West Virginia.

Lawyers for the Department of Justice and IRS – as well as IRS Commissioner John Koskinen – have stated under oath that the tapes no longer existed because they had been “recycled.”