Posted on 09/17/2014 3:12:32 PM PDT by Bubba_Leroy
Internal Revenue Service (IRS) commissioner John Koskinen testified Wednesday that the IRS did not save any of the information on Lois Lerner’s destroyed Blackberry and that there is no outside system to store agency emails.
“Hard drive crashes continue as we speak,” Koskinen admitted at a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee hearing when asked if any computers had recently crashed under his watch.
Koskinen admitted that destroying records would be an act “not consistent with the law,” but maintained that there’s no evidence that the IRS intentionally destroyed records.
“Ms. Lerner’s Blackberry was replaced in February 2012 as part of an ongoing Blackberry update….it was disposed of under standard procedures at that time,” Koskinen said.
Koskinen claimed that information from Lerner’s Blackberry could not be transferred to her new model because “Our Blackberries only display email that is displayed by our employees’ Microsoft Outlook emails, which is maintained on IRS servers.”
Koskinen also said that there’s no outside system to save IRS employees’ emails.
“There is no system outside the IRS, government or otherwise, that the IRS uses to back up or store emails,” Koskinen said.
Koskinen didn’t mention that the IRS terminated its years-long contract with its email archiving company Sonasoft shortly after Lerner’s computer crashed.
“It is not clear that there are backup tapes that have any information on them,” Koskinen said. “I never said they disappeared, I said they were recycled.”
But the IRS could have easily saved all records, information, and history on Lois Lerner’s Blackberry, according to a Blackberry user guide.
“If you have installed the BlackBerry® Desktop Software on your computer, you can back up and restore most of your BlackBerry smartphone data, including messages, organizer data, fonts, saved searches, and browser bookmarks using the BlackBerry Desktop Software. For more information, see the Help in the BlackBerry Desktop Software,” according to Blackberry.
“If your email account uses a BlackBerry® Enterprise Server, you might be able to restore synchronized organizer data to your smartphone over the wireless network. To restore synchronized organizer data over the wireless network, you must have an activation password. For more information, contact your administrator,” the Blackberry manual continues.
Koskinen said that if the agency destroyed records then “that was an act not consistent with the law” but said, “There’s no evidence that there were records destroyed.”
Koskinen also admitted that IRS employees routinely use personal email accounts to conduct agency business but maintained that “they do it inadvertently.”
I have had my own small business for about 15 years now. I cannot count the number of hard drives that I have had to replace during that time. Hard drives are like tires, it is not a question of if they will wear out, just a question of when.
And yet, in all that time, I have never lost any data. None. I can produce every electronic file that I have created during the past 15 years (including income tax records, in case the IRS decides to audit me).
It is called redundant backups. The storage technology keeps changing and improving, but the concept remains the same. Regularly copy everything onto different media kept in different locations. Regularly check your backup systems to make sure that everything is getting backed up. That is all there is to it.
Any idiot can figure out how to do it. I am willing to bet that the IRS has a whole staff of idiots working full time to do it for them.
No major business in the USA would think of using that as an excuse.
You can be a millionaire.. and never pay taxes! You say.. "Steve.. how can I be a millionaire.. and never pay taxes?" First.. get a million dollars. Now.. you say, "Steve.. what do I say to the tax man when he comes to my door and says, 'You.. have never paid taxes'?" Two simple words. Two simple words in the English language: "I forgot!" How many times do we let ourselves get into terrible situations because we don't say "I forgot"?
Serious question. What does a hard drive have to do with email? I’ve accessed my old emails from a tablet in Costa Rica. Unless my computer turns itself on when I’m overseas, I don’t think a hard drive has shinola to do with email.
Reminds me of an old joke. Two businessmen from the same city meet in the clubhouse of a luxury retirement complex in Florida. “You retired too?” says one to the other.
“Yes, our buildings had a catastrophic fire; so I took the insurance and retired. What about you?”
“Oh”, he replied, “we had a terrible flood that destroyed our business, so I also took the insurance and retired.”
He asked in reply “So, how do you start a flood?”
How DO you crash multiple hard drives?
The easy rebuttal to this should be: “Everyone at the IRS whose hard drive crashed should hope beyond hope that no evidence of impropriety exists, because if they are implicated in such impropriety, they may be assured that they will spend time as inmates in federal prison.
“However, if they come forward with evidence implicating others of impropriety, they will likely be offered a deal so that they alone will not become a felon.”
This is such Bovine Excrement. Emails are stored on servers. They tell us ours are forever so be careful why you say. There’s something here they’re trying to hide. And it must be damaging.
Lying liars and the lies they tell.
The company I worked for up until this May (I retired)kept all of our E-mail on back-ups. If my hard drive crashed they could reestablish all my e-mails. They were not required by law to do this, but it made good business sense so they were willing to pay the minor cost of this service. The IRS is lying because of political considerations.
A decent lawyer would insist on getting the IRS to produce a complete list of every hard drive that has crashed since 1 year before Obama took office and the name of the employee using the computer prior to the crash. Either it will show a consistent random series of crashes or it will have a pattern of spikes centered on key figures coinciding with developments in the scandal.
Oh how I would love to frog walk Koskinen to the slammer, lock the door and lose the key.
It’s nothing more than a joke to the IRS at this point. They know the republicans don’t have the fortitude to do a damn thing about it. Nobody, I mean nobody, is going to risk their political gravy train job to put a stop to any of this. What happened to Trey Gowdy? Man he talked big a while back, but we haven’t heard a whole hell of a lot out of him lately.
This freaking pos libtard koskinen needs a reality check, by that I mean an @ss whipping.
I hear things from conservative talking heads like, “concerned citizens should be outraged”, and so forth. I’m pretty sure the majority of Americans who pay attention are ready to see people hang, or at least rot in jail over this.
My question is: if our elected officials dont give a damn about what we have to say, what do we do next.
I’m not a classified as a “ protected class” by my government. I’m not a muslim terrorist, or an illegal that crossed the border illegally, or lgbt abcdef, or an effing spotted owl, so I don’t have a voice.
WTF does a guy like me do? Vote? There’s more of these politically asexual jack wads in the pipeline than I have votes (I’m not dead nor a dimocrat, I only get one vote). I need direction.
It depends on your e-mail service and client.
I have used Outlook as my e-mail client since the late 1990s.
Back when I accessed my e-mail through a dial up ISP and a POP e-mail service, e-mails were saved to .pst files on each users' hard drive. Every night, I copied the .pst files to my server (which I regularly backed up).
About 7 or 8 years ago, I upgraded to my own Outlook exchange server. All of the e-mails were saved on my server (which I regularly backed up).
About 3 years ago it was time to replace my exchange server and I found that hosted exchange servers had become much more reliable and cheaper than owning my own. You can get a hosted exchange server account at MicroSoft that includes all of the MS Office programs (Outlook, Word, Excel, etc.) for $20 per user per month. Copies of all e-mails are saved to .ost files on each user's hard drive (which I again copy to my server and then back up). E-mails are also saved on the hosted exchange server, but only 10GB per user under my account.
I think it is almost certain that the IRS has its own exchange servers, which they should be backing up. Copies of e-mails may also be saved to .ost files on each user's hard drive, which should also be backed up.
If I had me choice of which to send to jail between this azzwipe and Mizzzz Lerner I would rather see her walking the streets and his butt behind the grey bars. At least that chitty grin would be wiped off his face.
I have a thought on timing of these hearings: the should not appear to end during Obama’s term. My point let there be no chance of pardons for the criminals in any of these scandals. I can tolerate justice delayed, but not justice denied by a Zero pardon.
His probably works on that heinous smirk in the mirror. And those beady eyes ...
I hear you. None of them should get away with this.
This is criminal. The IRS is acting as a crime syndicate and those involved should be charged with RICO statute.
Un-freakin believable. Shut it down. Shut down the IRS.
How do satirists stay one step ahead of reality anymore?
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