Conservative group True the Vote lost a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over former IRS official Lois Lerners’ lost emails Thursday, Politico reports:
The IRS won what might be round one in a series of contests pitting tea party groups against the agency, with a federal judge rejecting a conservative group’s bid for a court-appointed forensics expert to hunt for ex-official Lois Lerner’s lost emails.
Judge Reggie Walton of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia said True the Vote in its lawsuit against the IRS, failed to show "irreparable harm" in its injunction relief request and that "the public interest weighs strongly against the type of injunctive relief the plaintiff seeks."
"Despite the general distrust of the defendants expressed by the plaintiff, the Court has no factual basis to concur with that distrust … and therefore concludes that the issuance of an injunction will not further aid in the recovery of the emails, if such recovery is possible, but will rather only duplicate and potentially interfere with ongoing investigative activities," he wrote in a court memorandum posted Wednesday afternoon.
The IRS says it lost thousands of emails from Lerner—the ex-IRS official at the heart of the conservative targeting scandal—after the hard drive of her computer broke.
Several other lawsuits against the IRS regarding the lost emails are still being litigated.