House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa's investigation into whether the IRS illegally targeted Tea Party groups for further review in 2012 has entered yet another phase.
For reasons not yet entirely clear, the California Republican is now demanding to see every email former IRS official Lois Lerner sent since 1986, when there was no such thing as the Tea Party, email was not generally used, and Ronald Reagan was president.
On Tuesday, Issa issued a subpoena to Federal Election Commission chief Lee Goodman ordering him to provide Issa's committee with every email Lerner sent between Jan. 1, 1986, and June 23, 2014 — including messages in which she was either a cc or bcc recipient. Lerner worked at the FEC from 1981 to 2001. Goodman has until July 7 to comply.
As the Huffington Post notes, the request is peculiar in no small part because email wasn't much used back in '86. The first commercialized use of email, HuffPo reports, was in 1988; and it wasn't until 1993 that big network service providers connected their systems to the Internet.
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