Well for one the IRS is sticking to the “Back up tapes are erased after 6 months” story line. I don't think it is so much about getting to the bottom of the Hard Drive issue to extract the emails. What we have is 10 or more IRS officials working in concert to cover their abusive tracks. There had to have been some foot soldiers politically aligned in the IT Dept. to pull this off. Keep applying the pressure, maybe someone cracks and takes a plea deal and blows this thing up all the way to the White House. Issa / Gowdy, whoever is in charge, should be subpoenaing the Nuts and Bolts IT Guys whom would have physically worked on these PCs. LET THEM SWEAT.
It's intentional.
Have you ever heard the term “digging your own grave”
Everyone knows they are lying and that they have tried to destroy the evidence
This charade is simply documenting the ongoing cover up and stonewalling. Congressional investigators have allowed them to build up a track record for criminal convictions even if they never find any of the missing data.
In Watergate the cover up was said to worse than the crime.
With the IRS scandal, it seems that the crime was much worse than the cover up, but the IRS id working hard to reverse that dynamic to make sure that the ongoing cover up is at some point much worse than the crime.
I'll bet my tax data isn't erased after 6 months. I'd be willing to bet they have decades and decades of my tax data. These people are morally corrupt and think nothing of protecting themselves at all costs via all manner of nefarious means.
For what it's worth, I retired from a large (20k staff) technology corporation 6 years ago and all communications and work files were up to the individual employee. There were central repositories, but it was up to each individual to select and initiate such storage. Team projects were handled the best, with emails the worst. However, in the fast world of technology, things are extinct in a couple of years and long-term archival procedures just didn't make much sense in that world.