Increasingly, those who continue to insist that there was no cover-up at the IRS after it was revealed that administrators consciously targeted conservative groups with undue scrutiny are finding that the burden of proof is on them to substantiate this outlandish claim. The undeniable evidence of malfeasance and criminality at the nation’s tax collection agency is mounting.

On Monday, the watchdog group Judicial Watch published a statement from the organization’s president which indicates that the IRS believes that Lois Lerner’s supposedly lost emails do exist, but that they would simply be difficult to uncover.

Department of Justice attorneys for the Internal Revenue Service told Judicial Watch on Friday that Lois Lerner’s emails, indeed all government computer records, are backed up by the federal government in case of a government-wide catastrophe. The Obama administration attorneys said that this back-up system would be too onerous to search. The DOJ attorneys also acknowledged that the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) is investigating this back-up system.

We obviously disagree that disclosing the emails as required would be onerous, and plan to raise this new development with Judge Sullivan.

This is a jaw-dropping revelation. The Obama administration had been lying to the American people about Lois Lerner’s missing emails. There are no “missing” Lois Lerner emails – nor missing emails of any of the other top IRS or other government officials whose emails seem to be disappearing at increasingly alarming rate. All the focus on missing hard drives has been a diversion. The Obama administration has known all along where the email records could be – but dishonestly withheld this information.

Chalk up “To onerous to search” as yet another excuse the IRS has made in its own defense that they would never let you get away with amid an audit.

The indications of criminal conduct out of the IRS did not stop there. On Monday, court filings revealed that the tax agency destroyed Lerner’s blackberry on which the suspect emails were contained after the agency learned that her computer had crashed and a congressional inquiry was already underway.

Via the New York Observer’s Sidney Powell:

Judge [Emmet] Sullivan has had to pry information from the IRS to learn anything about Ms. Lerner’s Blackberry. Now, with these latest revelations, I’m confident he’s not finished.

In two elusive and nebulous sworn declarations, we can glean that Ms. Lerner had two Blackberries. One was issued to her on November 12, 2009. According to a sworn declaration, this is the Blackberry that contained all the emails (both sent and received) that would have been in her “Outlook” and drafts that never were sent from her Blackberry during the relevant time.

With incredible disregard for the law and the Congressional inquiry, the IRS admits that this Blackberry “was removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012.” This is a year after her hard drive “crash” and months after the Congressional inquiry began.

In June, the White House suggested that the Republican-backed probes into the IRS’s behavior amounted to little more than the servicing of their paranoid “conspiracy theories.” Increasingly, though, tax agency officials appear to have been involved in a something closer to a genuine plot to hide evidence of wrongdoing from the public.

And those Democrats who continue to defend this agency out of some misguided sense of loyalty toward the president will find themselves in an increasingly untenable position. Those smart enough to read the writing on the wall see that. The dam is about to burst.

The National Review’s Kevin Williamson’s reaction to the latest developments was succinct and comprehensive:

So those "missing" IRS emails were never missing. Can we indict somebody now, please?

— Kevin D. Williamson (@KevinNR) August 26, 2014

Somebody at the IRS, and possibly at DOJ, needs to go to prison for the rest of his or her natural life.

— Kevin D. Williamson (@KevinNR) August 26, 2014

Indeed.