November 7, 2014
IRS admits to court it hasn’t searched for missing Lois Lerner e-mails in the obvious places
By Thomas Lifson
From the referenced article in post #51
“If there was ever any doubt that the IRS is stonewalling production of the missing Lois Lerner e-mails, recent IRS filings in the Judicial Watch lawsuit in the court of U.S. District Court Judge Emmett G. Sullivan remove all ambiguity. Even though the IRS has stipulated to Judicial Watch that backup systems exist to preserve all federal government e-mails, it has not bothered to search them, and now admits that to the court.
A press release from Judicial Watch that has received far too little media attention (with the conspicuous exception of Legal Insurrection) explains:
IRS attorneys conceded that they had failed to search the agencys servers for missing emails because they decided that the servers would not result in the recovery of any information. They admitted they had failed to search the agencys disaster recovery tapes because they had no reason to believe that the tapes are a potential source of recovering the missing emails. And they conceded that they had not searched the government-wide back-up system because they had no reason to believe such a system even exists.
But:
The IRS admitted to Judge Sullivan that the agency failed to submit declarations about any of the foregoing items because it had no reason to believe that they were sources from which to recover information lost as a result of Lerners hard drive failure. [Emphasis added] Department of Justice attorneys for the IRS had previously told Judicial Watch that Lois Lerners emails, indeed all government computer records, are backed up by the federal government in case of a government-wide catastrophe.
This sounds like a bad-faith effort really, contempt of court. Judge Sullivan cannot be happy about this cavalier failure to exert any effort to comply with an order. Judicial Watch continues:
The Obama administration attorneys said that this back-up system would be too onerous to search.”