[Squeako]

I think what happened is they deleted the local records of their internal IRS instant messages, then everyone who was party to those conversations had "hard drive failures" because Lerner asked about them being recovered and electronically searched by Congressional investigators.

At that point the hard drives were removed and physically destroyed. I would think that when the computers were set up with the new drives, the users' systems were restored from a backup, so even if these messages were deleted there would be a record of them somewhere.

[WILLIALAL]

so even if these messages were deleted there would be a record of them somewhere.........

They had tape backup, which was written over after 6 months. But if her other files were recovered for her new computer, why weren’t her emails. Emails are just too essential to government work to just be eliminated. They are a paper trail and time stamp for a person like Lerner, who would need those emails to keep track of on going IRS business. No one would have their data recovered and not their emails, that makes no sense.