Everyone above a certain level should be fired for incompetence if the emails are truly lost. I think the IRS assumes the worst if a taxpayer loses his documentation.
No emails were LOST.
If they do not exist at this time, then they were hunted down and deleted. This would have been a monstrous undertaking. Hundreds if not thousands of servers would have had to have been searched. Offline as well as online resources would have had to have been searched and altered.
The breadth of this is impressive and also highly illegal.
Something was missed. It always is when it comes to computers. Let the hunt begin...