I was listening to a House meeting this morning querying the new director of the IRS. He was asked why the IRS waited months to tell the committee about the lost Lerner E-mails and the damaged hard drive. He responded by saying that they were trying to recover the E-mails and didn’t want to make an incomplete report.
A few minutes later he said that the hard drive was sent to recycling in 2011.
In other words, they found all kinds of damning evidence in Lois (I plead the fifth) Lerner’s E-mails, and then spent a few months strategizing about how best to destroy the evidence.
We saw this same story 40 years ago. Nixon said he was not a crook. Obama says there was not a smidgen of corruption.
“I am not a crook”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sh163n1lJ4M
Emails on my PC are not backed up. My ISP doesn’t keep them. If the hard drive crashes, as happened two weeks ago, the emails are lost. There is software available to attempt to recover data from a “dead” disk. A friend recommended one he uses. I can’t remember the name. I did look it up on the world wide waste of time, and it was $89. Not that important to me. I could also take it to my favorite PC service company, and get them to recover what they can. They did that for my son a couple of years ago, and, for $99, they recovered everything. At least, we couldn’t think of anything missing. The FBI has all the tools to recover disks, too.
I think all of the above is happy horsesh|+. When I still worked in the corporate environment, all email went through corporate servers. EVERYTHING was saved. By legal requirement. There is no damn way the IRS doesn’t have everything saved on their servers. Unless . . . unless . . . they feloniously deleted it. Every one of them who says they don’t have the emails is saying, “I’m committing a felony.”
+100
I have to actively delete emails from my AOL account that I have not read (adverts and such). As far as emails that I have read, there are emails online in my ‘old mail’ folder from 2010. I again have to go in and actively delete them as well. Spam folder is the only one that gets dumped after a week.
Unless I deleted emails, on every company network I have worked on my emails were saved on the network indefinitely. Of course those were all private businesses.
There needs to be a special prosecutor who starts putting people under oath. None of the Commissioners is ever going to try to get the truth, and neither are the Democrats on the committees.
Just start putting people under oath and not only will the emails show up, either from the archives, or from other people copied on the emails, but people will start telling about what Lois told them and did, also what other managers told them and did.
Uhm, doesn’t the NSA have everybody’s emails? Just for fun the House should subpoena them….
It wouldn’t be that hard to just track every email received FROM her email address by anyone else in the agency during a specific time frame. Now if all of THOSE are gone too, then Houston has a bigger problem than it appears it does.
Maybe the IRS could contact Sonasoft, the company that was granted a contract and was being paid to backup their email.
http://reason.com/blog/2014/06/20/the-irs-had-a-contract-with-an-email-bac?fb_action_ids=880772241952237&fb_action_types=og.likes
Yes. They DO have backups…
“What? You mean that government officials would lie about something that important?!”
Obviously you are a plant sent here to spread disinformation, lies and general FUD. The IRS Commissioner assured a House committee today of the facts in this latest issue. The e-mails are gone, never to be found, erased forever from hard drives once in possession of Lois Lerner. No amount of investigating by a House committee will change the facts. This event is closed and done with. There is nothing now, or in the future to see. Move along now as there is nothing of value here to see …
/sarc
Yep. Lerner’s hard drive was thrown away. And recycled. Wait . . . what?
Jim, you scared be there for a moment until I saw the /sarc at the bottom…
Yes, the IRS very carefully weighed Ms Lerner’s hard drive and determined that it had nothing but zeroes stored on it. 🙂
If any business tried to pull this stunt before the Federal Government they’d be criminally or civilly charged. There are laws enforcing businesses document retention for 7 years including emails, and not on some random PC.
Hey Justa Joe! I have seen several comments around the web that say pretty much what you said: “If any business tried to pull this stunt…” and you are very much correct. While I am not certain, I believe that there are existing regulations that specify similar requirements for the IRS, so it might be more accurate to say, “If the IRS were bound by the law…”
It may seem like I am nit-picking, but the point that I am trying so poorly to make is this: it may be true that we have one set of rules for business and a second set of rules for government, but the bigger problem is that even the laws that we DO have (especially those that are mean to restrict those who “serve” in government) are not enforced.
We have laws against gun running — but people in our government violate that and are not prosecuted. We have laws against illegal immigration, but people in our government will not enforce them. We have laws against the IRS targeting political enemies, but those laws are not enforced either.
As I say, maybe I am putting too much stress on a minor point, but to me the distinction is important.
I don’t think you can put too much stress on your point, because it is THE point, that no one should be allowed to forget or try to keep others from seeing and understanding: The federal government, across all major departments, is out of control now, acting blatantly criminally (even the Supreme Court, when it ruled the Obamacare fine for not buying their product was a “tax”–and one not originated in the House, as the law requires).
I’ve learned two things.
1) There’s the laws for us and the laws for them (government and those close to it).
2) All laws are selectively enforced.
Anyone who is well liked and in/close to government can basically get away with anything.
Decentralized computing in large organizations went out of style 15 years ago. This means the use of things like exchange servers that centralize email. Unless the IRS is doing something positively ancient the emails all existed on the centralized server for some period of time where they would have been backed up several times a day. At minimum once a day. Now it’s possible she and those she corresponded with internally at the IRS downloaded their emails locally and some didn’t get backed up, but odds are between sender and receiver 90%+ of them got backed up and the almost all of the remaining 10% could be reconstructed from quoted material in those that did. Now there is the question of back up retention and such.
It’s just another bullshit story for the public to consume with the fans of the teams arguing over it.
What wrong with a government that collects as much of our tax money as they do that they can’t get into at least 20th century technology? Do they need Russian assistance for their email like they do to get to the space station?
We all live in Kenya now. You’re not in Kansas anymore.
The more we find out, the worse it gets…
Now, where did I leave my antiemetics…?