On behalf of the country, Judge Emmet Sullivan is pounding the IRS and appears as unsatisfied as most of America with the agency’s stalling, side-stepping, neglect, arrogance, and cavalier attitude toward its legally required record-retention responsibilities. Late yesterday afternoon, Judge Sullivan entered an order that demands answers to a lot more questions.

The IRS’s filing in Judge Sullivan’s court Monday evidenced no interest in finding the emails all of us know are out there somewhere. The fact that the IRS took thirty days to file its meager declarations, which actually said less than it had disclosed to Congress, is truly insulting. The agency better take Judge Sullivan seriously—and fast—or he’s the one who will be furious. Have IRS officials Kane and Koskinen still not reviewed what this fearless enforcer of the law did to the last Department of Justice prosecutors who played games with the truth in his courtroom?

The Judge entered an order at 4:20 p.m. yesterday giving the IRS only until August 22 — one week! — to:

“(1) provide information about its efforts, if any, to recover missing Lois Lerner emails from alternate sources (i.e., Blackberry, iPhone, iPad);

(2) provide additional information explaining the IRS’s policy of tracking inventory through use of bar code property tags, including whether component parts, such as hard drives, receive a bar code tag when serviced. If individual components do not receive a bar code tag, provide information on how the IRS tracks component parts, such as hard drives, when being serviced;

(3)provide information about the IRS’s policy to degauss hard drives, including whether the IRS records whose hard drive is degaussed, either by tracking the employee’s name or the particular machine with which the hard drive was associated; and

(4) provide information about the outside vendor who can verify the IRS’s destruction policies concerning hard drives.”

The IRS is represented by Department of Justice attorneys. Do they not read the news, the latestbooks, or the law? This column has tried to warn them repeatedly that, like Toto, they’re not in Kansas any more. They are in the federal courtroom of a real Article III judge who has powers they should bloody well know not to ignore—the same kind wielded by Judge John Sirica, whose integrity and persistence in dealing with the Watergate case led to the resignation of Richard M. Nixon.

This is the same Emmet Sullivan who appointed a special prosecutor and initiated criminal contempt proceedings and a full investigation of the Department of Justice attorneys who played unethical and dishonest games in the prosecution of United States Senator Ted Stevens.

Someone in DOJ or the IRS better find those emails, fast, or this Judge will do it for them and they’ll just think they were caught up in a Category V tornado—or wish they had been and carried off to Oz instead. Judge Sullivan will keep on until he finds the man behind the curtain.

One of the things I can’t help but continue to wonder is, if the emails and all the information truly were not recoverable from the Lerner hard drive, why did the hard drive have to be “degaussed” and destroyed to “protect taxpayer privacy”? And why did someone testify to Congress that an IRS IT expert said it should be given to an outside vendor to retrieve the messages—and instead, the hard drive was degaussed and shredded?

With each turn, the IRS has raised more questions than it has answered. But this time it’s not the media and the citizens doing the asking. They’ve now got a week to answer to a judge.