You tell me what the angle here is. Obviously they’re not really interested in finding out what Lerner and the IRS were up to in targeting tea-party groups. If they were, they would have interviewed the targets, which they haven’t.

Are they suddenly worried about the politics of this? Was Holder quietly replaced when we weren’t looking by someone who’s not a political hack? What’s the frequency, Kenneth?

As part of its criminal probe into the IRS’s treatment of politically active conservative groups, the Justice Department is “investigating the circumstances of the lost emails from [former IRS official Lois Lerner’s] computer,” according to prepared testimony by James Cole, the deputy attorney general. Mr. Cole is set to appear at a hearing scheduled for Thursday before a panel of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The Wall Street Journal reviewed his prepared testimony on Wednesday.

Mr. Cole’s comments underscore the potential seriousness of the email loss, which has roiled congressional probes of the matter and angered some top GOP lawmakers. The IRS has blamed the loss on a crash of Ms. Lerner’s hard drive—a common occurrence at the agency, officials say. They add a backup tape also was routinely recycled after six months.

Maybe Holder realized that House Republicans really might impeach him and that that impeachment effort would be harder for Democrats to spin than if the GOP went after Obama. Ted Cruz has been saying for weeks that if Holder refuses to appoint a special prosecutor for the IRS scandal, he should be impeached. There’s a bill floating around in the House that would declare “no confidence” in Holder’s DOJ and give him the opportunity to step down during the August recess before beginning impeachment proceedings against him in September if he refuses. Senate Democrats wouldn’t vote to remove him, of course, but they don’t want to spend the fall playing defense on this guy. Bad enough that they’d have to explain why the attorney general has no interest in something as shady as evidence going missing from a computer used by an already shady-seeming IRS official. If the GOP comes after Holder, though, it’d force them to revisit other stuff too — not just conservative interests like Fast & Furious but bipartisan outrages like Holder authorizing the DOJ to snoop on reporter James Rosen in the name of sniffing out a leak. If Obama were being impeached, Democrats could ride the backlash to safety. How much of a backlash would there really be, though, to impeaching Holder? You know what he’d say — he’s already previewed his defense — but that wouldn’t explain his indifference towards Lerner’s hard drive.

So, they’re going to throw the GOP a bone and investigate. Hooray. Exit question: Do you think they’ll find anything incriminating? I can’t shake the funny feeling that they won’t.