IRS COMMISSIONER: Our Story On The IRS Scandal Isn’t Changing. It’s Just, You Know, Evolving Now And Then.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) commissioner denied Wednesday that his agency had an ever-shifting story when it came to former official Lois Lerner’s missing emails.

Republicans weren’t buying it.

John Koskinen, the IRS chief, used his testimony to rebut statements from a conservative group that the agency had back-ups of Lerner’s emails, and sought to explain why Lerner’s BlackBerry was wiped clean just months before she started getting questioned about the agency’s improper scrutiny of Tea Party groups.

Koskinen said that Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration was examining back-up tapes, which the IRS had routinely recycled before 2013, to see if any of Lerner’s emails could be retrieved.

Lerner’s old BlackBerry, Koskinen added, was recycled to protect confidential taxpayer information. The BlackBerry, Koskinen said, would have been little help to investigators anyway, because Lerner’s email was managed elsewhere.

“I’ve tried to tell you the truth every time I’ve been here,” Koskinen told a House Oversight subcommittee on Wednesday.

Koskinen’s Wednesday appearance was at least his fourth just before the Oversight panel since the agency said in June that a computer crash left it unable to locate an untold number of Lerner’s emails from 2009 to 2011.

Lerner, who formerly headed an IRS division overseeing tax-exempt groups, has long been the central figure in the agency’s Tea Party controversy.

I’ve taken a dislike to this Koskinen fellow. He seems sleazy even by DC standards.