Topic: IRS claims it has LOST two years' worth of emails from former official Lerner - page 18. (Read 22699 times)

What abou the NSA's "backups."  

Cleta Mitchell, the attorney who represents many of the targeted conservative groups in a suit against the IRS, went on FOX News Sunday this morning to discuss the latest developments in the IRS targeting scandal.

Cleta dropped this bomb. It completely discredits the IRS’s latest talking points that Lois Lerner’s emails were lost in a single computer crash.

“I’ve had IRS employees who have emailed me this week who said all of their servers, it’s not just one little server in Washington, that there are servers in three different places in the United States. The IRS has a contract with a professional email archiving company. I want to know what the FBI has done to step in and bring forward their very sophisticated capabilities to understand what happened.”

http://youtu.be/X884f0uj9v8

http://www.irs.gov/irm/part1/irm_01-010-003.html

 “IRS offices will not store the official recordkeeping copy of email messages that are federal records ONLY on the electronic mail system,”

translation: backing up everything is the law.

Anytime that a hard drive fails in any major corporation (I assume that the government would work the same way in this regard) someone will make an attempt to recover data on the hard drive, it is common for at least some data to be recovered.

From news reports it appears that her Microsoft outlook email account would only keep emails in a user's inbox for a certain amount of time (6 months would be the likely time-frame) after which they would be automatically deleted. If an employee wanted/needed to keep an email for a longer time then they would move them to a personal folder (aka .pst folder/file).

It is common to have compliance requirements to move emails to an archive inbox when they are no longer needed. The "archive inbox" would have emails saved and archived and then deleted from the inbox on a daily basis. This is to be done manually by employees on a periodic basis. The emails that are archived are still accessible if it turns out they will be needed at a later point, the employee can contact the person who has access to the archives with a request and the subject email would be provided. It would generally be against policy to house emails on your computer after the time you no longer need access to an email on a day to day basis.

The answer to the question of would it be possible that these email were really lost would be yes that would be possible. With that being said it would be undeniable that Lerner violated policy by not having her emails sent to the archives for two years. Is this something that she could go to jail for, I am not sure. Is this something she could go to jail for considering that the information contained in the emails could potentially contain information about possible crimes, the chances of jail time are considerably higher. Should she go to jail for this, most likely yes, unless she can provide information that shows she was following direction from someone above her, however even in this situation she should only receive a reduced jail sentence as opposed to no jail at all.

Here is the US Treasury contract with Sonasoft from 2000 to 2012.


http://www.fedspending.org/fpds/fpds.php?reptype=r&database=fpds&unique_transaction_id=6b1e1ac07603a819d7c7d1c22d9eea24&detail=3&datype=T&sortp=i

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Let's see if they have "crashed" their back up too.... Only on those lerner + 6 others of course 

Is that a smoking gun I smell? It turns out the IRS contracted with a company that provides email backup services starting in 2005. This first came to light in the Twitter feed of moregenr[ed. - researcher for the dearly departed Verum Serum blog], who noticed that the IRS appears on the client list of email archiving service provider Sonasoft.

This was was picked up by Peter Suderman of Reason, who writes:

The IRS had a contract with email backup service vendor Sonasoft starting in 2005,according to FedSpending.org, which lists the contract as being for “automatic data processing services.” Sonasoft’s motto is “email archiving done right,” and the companylists the IRS as a customer.

In 2009, Sonasoft even sent out a Tweet advertising its work for the IRS.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/06/irs_contracted_with_email_archiving_company_in_2005.html

http://www.sonasoft.com/company/customers/

Lerner’s Hard Drive Mysteriously “Crashed” 10 Days After House GOP Began Investigation…

Lois Lerner’s emails are lost, and they need finding. In the meantime, their very disappearance tells us that Congress is sniffing down the right trail.

A year into congressional investigations of IRS targeting, we know two things beyond a doubt. We know from the public record that starting in 2010 the most powerful leaders of the Democratic Party—President Obama, Senate chairmen, House Democrats—ran a ceaseless campaign pressuring the IRS to silence conservative groups. We also know from internal IRS emails that Ms. Lerner, the former head of exempt organizations, was at the epicenter of an agency effort to silence those very groups, in the precise same time frame.

What we don’t know is the interaction between the two. The IRS’s deliberate withholding for a year of Lerner emails allowed the press and liberals to crow that there was no “there” there—zero evidence of Lerner collusion with anybody in the Democratic Party. At the very worst, went the explanation, Ms. Lerner and her IRS pals were zealous bureaucrats, primed to crack down on campaign money, and therefore eager to interpret the Democratic campaign as an order to act. […]

As to Ms. Lerner’s behavior, consider that House Ways & Means Chairman Dave Camp first sent a letter asking if the IRS was engaged in targeting in June, 2011. Ms. Lerner denied it. She engineered a plant in an audience at a tax conference in May 2013 to drop the bombshell news about targeting (maybe hoping nobody would notice?). She has subsequently asserted a Fifth Amendment right to silence in front of the only people actually investigating the affair, Congress. Now we learn that her hard drive supposedly defied modernity and suffered total annihilation about 10 days after the Camp letter arrived.

Is there something in those lost emails? The fact that they are “lost” at all probably answers that question.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/kim-strassel-about-those-missing-emails-1403220814

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Her hard drive and those of 6 others directly involved.. Died.
Not a smidgen of corruption

[...]
“The United States was founded on the belief government is subservient and accountable to the people.  Taxpayers shouldn’t be expected to follow laws the Obama administration refuses to follow themselves,” said Stockman.  “Taxpayers should be allowed to offer the same flimsy, obviously made-up excuses the Obama administration uses.”


1.         The dog ate my tax receipts
2.         Convenient, unexplained, miscellaneous computer malfunction
3.         Traded documents for five terrorists
4.         Burned for warmth while lost in the Yukon
5.         Left on table in Hillary’s Book Room
6.         Received water damage in the trunk of Ted Kennedy’s car
7.         Forgot in gun case sold to Mexican drug lords
8.         Forced to recycle by municipal Green Czar
9.         Was short on toilet paper while camping
10.       At this point, what difference does it make?


http://stockman.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/stockman-bill-allows-taxpayers-to-use-same-lame-excuses-as-irs

This obvious lie about losing the emails is funny and all, but it's pretty obvious that a group of government officials used their power to punish their political opponents. That's fucked up. And it's fucked up that Obama and his supporters are helping cover it up. (Hell, Obama might've asked the IRS to do it.)

Fascist bastards.

I wonder what the Founding Fathers would've done in a situation like this? Actually, we all know, and we all know we can't say it out loud.

http://youtu.be/rYgFowzZgA8

Sources: Lois Lerner’s emails likely gone forever

Ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s crashed hard drive has been recycled, making it likely the lost emails of the lightening rod in the tea party targeting controversy will never be found, according to multiple sources.
“We’ve been informed that the hard drive has been thrown away,” Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, said in a brief hallway interview.

Two additional sources told POLITICO the same late Wednesday, citing IRS officials.

It may just be standard government procedure, but the revelation is significant because some lawmakers and observers thought there was a way that tech experts could revive Lerner’s emails after they were washed away in a computer crash in the summer of 2011. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), for example, subpoenaed her damaged hard drive earlier this week, when he asked for “all hard drives, external drives, thumb drives and computers” and “all electronic communication devices the IRS issued to Lois G. Lerner.”
“IT experts have weighed in and said yes — we can get those” emails, said Rep. Charles Boustany (R-La.) earlier Wednesday.
The latest news suggests such professionals may never get the chance to try again — and the IRS has even said its criminal investigators who specialize in rebuilding hard drives to recover hidden information from criminals were unable to restore the data back in 2011. But this is only likely to further enrage Republicans, who are fuming over the matter and suspect Washington officials drove the selective scrutiny.

The IRS told congressional investigators on Friday that the emails of Lerner, the former head of the tax exempt division that was found to have singled out conservative groups for additional scrutiny, were lost from 2009 to 2011 in a computer hard drive crash in early summer 2011. IRS chief John Koskinen will face angry Republicans at a hearing on Friday.
The time frame is significant because the tea party targeting began in spring of 2010, and Republicans think if there was a smoking gun connecting the Obama administration to the IRS treatment of conservative groups, it could be found during that period.
“We believe the standard IRS protocol was followed in 2011 for disposing of the broken hard drive. A bad hard drive, like other broken Information Technology equipment, is sent to a recycler as part of our regular process,” an IRS spokesman said in response to a query from POLITICO.

On Wednesday, the White House retorted that for the time frame in which Lerner’s emails are missing, there are no direct communications between 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and the now-retired Lerner.
Earlier this week, Ways and Means Republicans said as many as six IRS employees involved in the scandal also lost email in computer crashes, including the former chief of staff for the acting IRS commissioner.
That’s because before May 2013, the IRS backed up emails only for six months on a tape, then recycled the tapes, so they essentially threw out the data. Many agencies do the same, transparency experts say.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, which wrote the May 2013 report that uncovered the practice of IRS workers singling out some applicants for tax breaks with the words “tea party” for added scrutiny, is currently in possession of Lerner’s laptop and her new hard drive, according to an IRS letter.
The IRS has been able to retrieve about 24,000 of Lerner’s emails sent to other IRS employees by recovering them from other agents who received, sent or were copied on the emails.
However, Koskinen has acknowledged that the IRS wouldn’t be able to find emails Lerner sent outside the agency.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/irs-lois-lerner-emails-108044.html#ixzz353PpAz4u

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/380576/irs-has-lost-more-e-mails-eliana-johnson

...The 5 for a deserter... The V.A. death scandal... The list goes on and on...

 

Far worse than the erased tapes issue.

Remember, Nixon really only had that ONE scandal.

Reagan really only had Iran/Contra.

Here we've got Bengazi, Fast and Furious, IRS, Iraq, Syria, basically the list is about as long as the activities that the klutze Obama has had his hands in. 

And this is an agency doing the stonewalling and lying, at the highest levels.  That is actually much more serious than if say, the POTUS lied about something.  It means the agency has been corrupted.  That has implications, particularly since the issue at stake is whether the agency was improperly influenced to attack conservatives.  So they cover up corruption with lying....

No difference than the 'Erased Tapes' from the Watergate scandal of the 70's. Actually, this may be worse. Lack of media outrage would imply their condoning the distraction of evidence by this Administration.

maybe they're just doing this to make people think that their snooping isn't as dangerous as everyone thinks.

The servers hold the data, and it's backed up daily.  Law requires archiving this stuff.

All you are looking at is a legal defense, a refusal to hand the data over.

Unfortunately, actions have consequences.  US Tax collection is unusual in that it's based on voluntary compliance, unlike many countries such as Italy and Greece, where the national sport is tax evasion.

These sort of actions by the IRS for short term political gain will have longer term negative consequences, if the agency's standing and reputation for unbiased fair enforcement is damaged.  I believe this should be stated pretty much in past tense at this point.

does anyone believe the IRS will provide this information?