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‘Congressional investigators are fuming over revelations that the Internal Revenue Service has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency’s tea-party controversy.” That’s the opening sentence of the Associated Press story on the IRS’s claim that it lost an unknown number of e-mails over two years relating to the agency’s alleged targeting of political groups hostile to the president. But note how the AP casts the story: The investigators — Republican lawmakers — are outraged. Is it really so hard to imagine that if this were a Republican administration, the story wouldn’t be the...

Hardly anyone accepts the IRS’ claim to have lost two years of Lois Lerner’s emails. Those most familiar with government record retention requirements, and the technology used, probably are the most skeptical. The supposedly lost emails cover January 2009 to April 2011, the period when Lerner is suspected of targeting conservative groups with heightened and invasive scrutiny. Those emails also pertain to communications Lerner may have had with agencies other than the Internal Revenue Service. That’s key, because many suspect that the Obama White House knew about, and may have coordinated, the targeting. Democrats in Congress including Rep. Elijah Cummings...

On Friday, the Internal Revenue Service informed Congressional investigators that it could not recover two years of emails from Lois Lerner, the former head of the agency's tax-exempt status department. Lerner has been at the center of the investigation into how and why the IRS applied additional scrutiny to the tax-exempt applications of Tea Party-affiliated organizations.

Here are the items Issa is asking the IRS to produce: + All back-up tapes, external drives, thumb drives, or other storage media the IRS used to capture, archive, back up, or otherwise record e-mails sent or received by Lerner from Jan. 1, 2009, to Sept. 23, 2013. + All hard drives, external drives, thumb drives, and computers Lerner used from Jan. 1, 2009, to Sept.23, 2013. + All electronic communication devices the IRS issued to Lerner from Jan. 1, 2009, to Sept. 23, 2013. + All electronic files, including, but not limited to, .pst files, relating to the IRS...

A little something extra on The Mysterious Case of Lois Lerner’s Hard Drive. There seem to be two different IRS regs governing e-mails. The Daily Caller already flagged one of them, “Emails as Possible Federal Records,” section 1.10.3.2.3. Subsection 3 states in part: If you create or receive email messages during the course of your daily work, you are responsible for ensuring that you manage them properly. The Treasury Department’s current email policy requires emails and attachments that meet the definition of a federal record be added to the organization’s files by printing them (including the essential transmission data)...

A House committee probing the IRS targeting scandal has subpoenaed Commissioner John Koskinen to testify over the agency’s claims it cannot locate a trove of emails belonging to Lois Lerner, the former agency official at the heart of the scandal. The IRS outraged congressional investigators Friday by saying it cannot find many of Lerner's emails prior to 2011 because her computer crashed during the summer of that year. Lerner headed the IRS division that processed applications for tax-exempt status. The IRS acknowledged last year that agents had improperly scrutinized applications for tax-exempt status by Tea Party and other conservative groups....

Jamie Estrada, 41, of Los Lunas, N.M., pleaded guilty Monday to the unlawful interception of electronic communications and false statement charges arising out of the unlawful interception of wire communications intended for others, including New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez and members of her staff. Estrada briefly served as campaign manager in 2009, as Martinez was beginning her bid for governor. The Republican won election in 2010 and took office in January 2011. “Each and every one of us has a right and an expectation of privacy in our electronic communications, including our emails, and those who violate the law by...

Last Friday afternoon, the Internal Revenue Service claimed that Lois Lerner, a former executive tasked with overseeing tax-exemption applications, lost thousands of emails after her computer crashed. Many of those emails, the tax collection agency claimed, could not be recovered. This convenient excuse for failing to comply with a request from House investigators is not sitting well with some in the journalistic community. “Do you believe in the Easter Bunny?” CNN’s John King asked his panel of political reporters on Monday. “Do you believe in Santa Claus? Do you believe that Lois Lerner’s emails suddenly went ‘poof?’” King added...

How Do I Get Rid Of An Email? I believed there was no sure way to eliminate an embarrassing Email or Internet posting. However, according to some recent news reports the IRS has discovered a way to eliminate select Emails.

Who knew that the Obama administration had a penchant for black humor? Earlier this year, in February, President Obama told Bill O’Reilly during an interview on Fox News that there was “not even a smidgen of corruption” in the IRS scandal involving the targeting of conservative nonprofit groups. In July 2103, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew foreshadowed his boss’s nonchalance by insisting that there was “no evidence” that any political appointee had been involved in the scandal. Now we may know why. After months of delay in responding to congressional inquiries, the IRS now claims that, for the period of January...

The cover-up is always worse than the crime, the conclusion drawn from Watergate, does not seem to have been learned by the IRS or whoever directed it to make the claim late Friday that emails from Lois Lerner to outside agencies (including most notably the White House) were lost in a computer “crash.” That claim is risible according to various experts. Jason Howerton of The Blaze interviewed veteran IT expert Norman Cillo, “an Army veteran who worked in intelligence and a former program manager at Microsoft,” who laid out six reasons, complete with charts, why he believes Congress is being...

Writing yesterday about the IRS’s amazing loss of more than two years of Lois Lerner’s emails (“Where’d they go? They were here just a minute ago!”), I wondered in passing how the Extended White House Public Relations Office, e.g., the New York Times, MSNBC, et al. would handle the news. The Nixon White House, you’ll recall, found quite a lot of the morning’s scrambled on its collective countenance when 18 and 1/2 minutes of audio tape somehow—somehow!—went missing as the Watergate scandal unfolded around the president. What a godsend to the guardians of our “Right to Know” Watergate was! Day...

Welcome to the FossaMail homepage! FossaMail is an Open Source, Mozilla Thunderbird-based mail, news and chat client for Windows, brought to you by the Pale Moon developer (and therefore not affiliated with the Mozilla Corporation). It is an optimized and reconfigured re-build of Mozilla Thunderbird ESR.

Still using email? You might already be behind the curve. Despite the fact that the Defense Department is well into a broad transition to defense enterprise email – with the Army fully migrated, the Air Force partially moved and several Pentagon executive offices on board – at least one top defense official believes email is on its way out. However, that does not mean it’s already known what comes after email. “I’m not sure what the medium is going to be, that’s what we’ve got to build now,” said Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronnie Hawkins, director of the Defense Information...

A newly-released government email indicates that within hours of the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya; the State Department had already concluded with certainty that the Islamic militia terrorist group Ansar al Sharia was to blame. The private, internal communication directly contradicts the message that President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice and White House press secretary Jay Carney repeated publicly over the course of the next several weeks. They often maintained that an anti-Islamic YouTube video inspired a spontaneous demonstration that escalated into violence. The email is entitled “Libya...

Baehr and Will Davis, were summoned to Washington for a meeting with the Postmaster General. Evan and Will wondered what it could be, “They must have seen the recent coverage in CNBC, maybe they’ll help our company expand?” Or, “maybe they wanted the traditional photo opportunity and positive media buzz that political actors care so much about. Surely their company made the Post Office look good, right?” But when the Postmaster General came out to meet them, the stark reality became clear, they weren’t interested in a photo-op. As Evan and Will describe it: “This 30-minute meeting was the end...

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) spends roughly $123.2 million per year to provide “email services” for its 70,000 employees, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Buried in a footnote of a recently released GAO report on the agency’s coordination with the nonprofit group Enroll America, the congressional watchdog detailed the high operating costs associated with running the department’s email. “HHS told us that HHS pays $146.64 per month per user for email; that this charge covers connectivity, storage, and other e-mail services; and that this charge is independent of the number of emails that are sent...

Good day, My family and I are currently searching for another email provider. We are seeking a service which uses SMTP-TLS in order to protect their clients privacy. Any suggestions/recommendations? Does anyone use FastMail? Thanks, TJI

Organizing For Action is, of course, the group founded by Team Obama in 2009 after he was sworn in to push his agenda while in office. It’s the successor to Obama For America, his 2008 campaign outfit. The first OFA got him elected, the second OFA is supposed to help get his policies through Congress. Here’s who was running the scrupulously impartial IRS Exempt Organizations Division that targeted dozens of tea-party nonprofits for extra scrutiny. Was she joking or wasn’t she? That’s the juiciest bit released today by the House Ways and Means Committee, which voted — along party lines,

Fundraising emails frequently offer an amusing glimpse into the thinking and strategy of a political party. Remember earlier this month when Democrat senators took to the floor for an overnight session about “climate change”? The very concerned senators warned of grave consequences of human activity, painted pictures of global catastrophe, and chided critics and “deniers” of “settled science.” And then proposed exactly zero words of legislation in a chamber they control. **SNIP** Now comes a fundraising email from Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA): We must rise to the challenge, but too many people are standing in our way.