Screw the hard drive. Subpoena the mail server backups. They think we’re stupid enough to believe that the personal hard drives of these people are the only copy.
+1
Subpoena the mail server backups.
Apparently they used tape backup, which was only good for 6 months before the tapes were reused.
The interesting thing is the judge wanting affidavits from their IT techs on how the hard drive was disposed of. There are established protocols for dealing with damaged government hard drives and certain forms have to be filled out and actions signed off.
This might lead to a paper trail as to who handled the disposal of the drive, as it was a government hard drive with other government and IRS info on it, some maybe confidential or classified, thereby requiring some attempt to reconstruct the info on that hard drive, not just for the e mails.
Was this done? If not how did Lerner recover the other info on her hard drive? You can’t lose everything on your computer and just pick up business the next day as if nothing happened. There would be years worth of government info that would have to be replicated.
-— Screw the hard drive. Subpoena the mail server backups -—
Yup.