IRS Knew Lerner Emails Were Missing For Months, ‘Lied To’ Congress

Daily Caller ^ | 6/17/2014 | Patrick Howley

[Mount Athos]

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) knew for months that Lois Lerner’s emails had been destroyed, even before the current IRS commissioner testified that his agency would produce all of them.

The IRS knew as early as February 2014 that Lerner’s emails were missing, top lawmakers on the House Committee on Ways and Means confirmed Tuesday. The IRS had this knowledge nearly three months before IRS commissioner John Koskinen agreed at a hearing to turn over all of Lerner’s emails to the committee.

Additionally, the IRS failed to deliver emails from six other IRS employees at the heart of the IRS targeting scandal including former IRS official and frequent White House visitor Nikole Flax, according to the Ways and Means Committee.

“It looks like the American people were lied to and the IRS tried to cover-up the fact it conveniently lost key documents in this investigation,” Ways and Means Committee chairman Rep. Dave Camp and Committee member Rep. Charles Boustany said in a statement. “The White House promised full cooperation, the Commissioner promised full access to Lois Lerner emails and now the Agency claims it cannot produce those materials and they’ve known for months they couldn’t do this.”

“Even when the IRS does admit something, they are not fully honest with us,” Camp and Boustany stated. “Despite their attempt to bury the missing Lerner emails on page 15 of a 27 page letter that arrived late Friday, we now know documents from other central figures, like Nikole Flax, are missing. The fact that Ms. Flax was a frequent visitor to the White House and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building only raises more questions. Who was she visiting at the White House and what were they talking about? Was she updating the White House on the targeting or was she getting orders? These are answers we don’t yet have, because – surprise, surprise – a few computers crashed. Plot lines in Hollywood are more believable than what we are getting from this White House and the IRS.”

[TigersEye]

These days most people under the age of 10 know that. LOL

[Dalberg-Acton]

I don’t believe the e-mails are missing. They are being withheld and lies are being told. Now, the Congress is being dared to do something about it.

[I am Richard Brandon]

Where is the Pubbie billionaire who will offer a nice big reward for some evidence?

[July4]

Withhold IRS funding until they start behaving like the public servants we hired them to be. They WILL produce those emails and more if squeezed hard enough.

[SampleMan]

TB also gives me the option (during setup) to delete or save the emails on the host server.

The point is that they are on the server UNLESS you delete them from the server.

[oh8eleven]

The point is that they are on the server ...
No, the point is you said ... "emails are never resident on a desk top machine" ... which isn't true.

[informavoracious]

Maybe they are buying time to concoct new, innocent emails. Perhaps they are hiring the one who concocted BO’s BC.

[mmichaels1970]

This would mean....for these emails to be missing...both environments would have been required to crash....and...email would be missing for more than 6 or 7 persons.

Unless their email policy never followed federal regulations and laws in the first place. If you assumed they were telling the truth, it didn't and it still isn't.

I heard that they are claiming that their policy at the time was to only allow 150MB of email to be stored in the server account. This is a woefully small amount even in 1990's standards.

As a mail admin, if you set mailbox size limitations, the user is warned and presented with an option to download their email from the server into a personal folder file (in Outlook this is a PST). At that time, the email is completely gone from the server and all subsequent network backups.

When I rarely make my user archive emails (some folks at my company have 10-15 gigabytes of email), I set it up so that the PST file is stored in a network location. This way, even though the email isn't saved in an email server backup, it is saved in my regular network file backup. The network drives are also redundant so if one drive crashes, others take over until a new one can be "hot swapped" back in. I may also store a copy of the PST file on a flashdrive.

Based on what the IRS is claiming, I would assume THEY forced Lerner to archive the email to her local computer (either laptop or desktop) which probably ran off of a single hard drive with no redundancy. To make matters worse, they appear to have had no individual backup procedure in place for individual client workstations. Any company that forces their users to rely on their workstation hard drive, should at least provide their users with a flash drive or external drive that would accommodate weekly backups. If this were the case, I'd schedule an individual backup for a specific day of the week and instruct the user that they need to leave their computer in their office during this scheduled time.

Now if they retained really old backups (which they claim they haven't), they could theoretically restore the mailbox BEFORE it was archived to the server. This would be tricky because with 150MB of storage, she could have been pulling her email off the server regularly and frequently making it virtually impossible to reliably restore from a backup.

When her hard drive crashed, she was informed that the data couldn't be recovered. I find it hard to believe. I've experienced several. If the data is considered valuable enough, you can send the drive to a recovery company where it is disassembled in a cleanroom environment. The data is then transferred to an external USB drive. Cost is about $1800. It is VERY expensive (at least to my small company), but recovery is normally at least 90-95% effective. You'd literally have to smash the hard drive with a hammer to get a 0% recovery IMHO.

We're also talking about a government with the capability to search scrubbed hard drives for things like child-porn and other illegal activities. I find it inconceivable that they could just toss away the hard drive of somebody in that position and accept a 0% data recovery. If this happened to the owner of MY company, you'd bet the $1800 would be spent and SOMETHING would be recovered.

Their story is almost certainly a lie. However, if it were taken as truth, the IRS has failed to conform to legal requirements for data storage and management. And they continue to do so. Lots of heads should roll and their probably shouldn't be an IT worker left at the agency when they're done. Not to mention the possibility of criminal charges for failing to comply with government regulations on data retention that they see fit to impose upon the private sector.

If they are telling the truth, then all relevant agencies and the democrat party should have THEIR email servers subpoenaed and searched for all mail sent from or sent to Lois Lerner and her close associates. And all of those agencies should have their data retention policies scrutinized as well.

Sorry about the marathon post.

[mmichaels1970]

She sent copies to exactly 6 people. Guess which 6.

IRS Has Lost More E-mails . . .

Your link absolutely proves that a computer crash WAS NOT responsible for the lost emails. They originally claimed that Lerner's emails were archived to a local PST file and HER hard drive crashed. The chances of several employees having THEIR hard drive crashing at the same time are impossible.

[MrB]

I don’t even accept the concept of the title.

The emails are available, and must be, by law.
They are not “missing”, and they probably haven’t been destroyed beyond recovery.

[don-o]

Very good post. One again we come to incompetence vs malevolence. Both / and?

[mmichaels1970]

One again we come to incompetence vs malevolence. Both / and?

This is malevolence in my mind. This is a "so what are you gonna do about it?" middle finger from the IRS.

[morphing libertarian]

It’s time to lock up, people in large chunks and let those who cooperate have a little more room to roam.

[mmichaels1970]

It’s time to lock up, people in large chunks and let those who cooperate have a little more room to roam.

Yup. Start with a few IT guys and see where that leads.

[morphing libertarian]

The soldiers will give up the capos, the capos will give up the Don.

[mmichaels1970]

In the article:

Sharyl Attkisson Asks Questions That CBS Isn't Asking About the Suddenly Missing IRS E-mails

The claim is:

The IRS told congressional investigators Friday it cannot locate many of Lois Lerner's emails prior to 2011 because her computer crashed that year.

Note the keyword "her". If HER computer crashed, why would they lose emails for six other people. Did THEIR computers crash too? Did they all share the same computer to save on hardware costs? Does the IRS have some sort of 1980's era computer lab where people timeshare a set group of computers?

I can just see Lerner sitting on the floor in the hallway with her walkman strapped on. Just waiting for a computer to come free so she could knock out a bit of IRS business.

If the IRS is going to claim that HER computer crashed causing the lost emails, then turn around and claim that several others lost their emails too, they have been caught in a lie.

[AU72]

The whole damn administration should be frog-marched to GITMO.

[Amagi]

Color me skeptical/disbelieving.

[dead]

If these emails really were completely destroyed, all copies, there will be an electronic trail implicating dozens of people.

Subpeona all their emails, business and private. Found out who they've been in contact with.

Congress needs to put these people, all of them, in prison for significant terms.

The Obama Administration has decided they can take the mild heat they'll take in the press, but lets see how their minions like hard time.

[SampleMan]

No, the point is you said ... "emails are never resident on a desk top machine" ... which isn't true.

Whatever, give yourself a gold star for pointing out that duplicate files can be saved from the server to a PC. Thanks, gosh, didn't know that. Luckily for FR we have IT geniuses like you to help with these things and to point out irrelevant exceptions in global statements.

For everyone else, the relevant point remains that the server, both the senders and receivers, holds the files. And only by intentional manipulation can that be modified. The Federal gov, by the way, requires duplicate server records.