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Great questions which contrasts sharply with the CBS online report:WASHINGTON - The Internal Revenue Service says it has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency's tea party controversy. The IRS told congressional investigators Friday it cannot locate many of Lois Lerner's emails prior to 2011 because her computer crashed that year. Lerner headed the IRS division that processed applications for tax-exempt status....The IRS was able to generate 24,000 Lerner emails from the 2009 to 2011 because Lerner had copied in other IRS employees. The agency said it pieced together the emails from the...

Apparently CBS News believes in the Easter Bunny. Newsbusters' Brad Wilmouth reported this morning that CNN's John King made this comment about the Lois Lerner emails that the IRS now claims are supposedly lost: ""Do you believe in the Easter Bunny? Do you believe in Santa Claus? Do you believe that Lois Lerner's emails just suddenly went poof?" Well, CBS News seems to be in Easter Bunny belief mode based on their narrow report Friday, IRS lost Lois Lerner's emails in tea party probe, which carefully avoids any curiosity as how such emails are now supposedly irretrievable. As we shall...

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...

On Monday, only CBS This Morning reported Friday's stunning revelation that the IRS somehow lost two years worth of emails from Lois Lerner, the official at the center of the agency scandal in which conservative groups were unfairly targeted. Neither NBC's Today nor ABC's Good Morning America bothered to cover the shocking development. However, both broadcasts did manage to find time for full reports on Britain's baby Prince George learning to walk. Cordes then concluded her report with more IRS spin suggesting the congressional investigation of the scandal was just a waste of time and money:

Friday’s revelation that the IRS “lost” Lois Lerner’s emails in a computer crash came ten months after Congress first requested them and seven months after they were first subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee. But what IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testified about the emails at a hearing in March appears to be at odds with his agency’s newer reported claims that the emails are irretrievable. Under questioning by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) on the House Oversight Committee, Koskinen said IRS emails are “get taken off and stored in servers.” That was part of the reason, he said, it was so...

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...

Explanations provided by the Internal Revenue Service for how it lost two years of former employee Lois Lerner's emails are "entirely reasonable," the White House said on Monday. "You’ve never heard of a computer crashing before?" White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters traveling with the president aboard Air Force One. Congressional Republicans have blasted the IRS's admission that it lost Lerner's emails from between 2009 and 2011 because of an apparent computer error. Lerner resigned from the agency amid controversy over charges her division unfairly targeted conservative political groups. In a statement Monday, House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa...

---snip--- Further, emails are universally backed up in some other medium, often electronic tape, for long-term storage. Thus, even if an email server is destroyed, or all emails are deleted from a server after a specified length of time, the emails are still recoverable from back-up storage media. The DOJ lawyer whom Scott quoted this morning was correct about this. The IRS, like virtually every other business or government entity, uses such a system. The Agency’s manual on “Managing Electronic Records” has been made public; you can read it here. A few relevant excerpts:

The IRS—remember those jaunty folks?—announced Friday that it can't find two years of emails from Lois Lerner to the Departments of Justice or Treasury. And none to the White House or Democrats on Capitol Hill. An agency spokesman blames a computer crash. Never underestimate government incompetence, but how convenient. The former IRS Director of Exempt Organizations was at the center of the IRS targeting of conservative groups and still won't testify before Congress. Now we'll never know whose orders she was following, or what directions she was giving. If the Reagan White House had ever offered up this excuse, John...

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) claimed Friday that it cannot produce Lois Lerner’s emails to and from the White House and other administration departments due to a supposed computer crash. The IRS previously agreed to hand over all of the ex-IRS official’s emails from 2009 to 2011 to the House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Rep. Dave Camp. But the IRS claimed Friday that it has Lerner’s emails to and from other IRS officials but it cannot produce emails to and from the Treasury and Justice Departments, the Federal Election Commission, or Democratic offices. The IRS’ computer crash may...

According to the House Ways and Means Committee, the IRS has "lost" two years of emails belonging to former head of tax exempt organizations Lois Lerner. The IRS doesn't have a record of her emails to outside groups or government agencies from January 2009 through April 2011, conveniently encompassing some of the same time when tea party groups were being targeted for extra scrutiny and possible criminal prosecution. The IRS says the loss of emails is due to a "computer crash" and claims emails from or to Lerner from the White House, Democratic members of Congress, the Treasury Department, FEC...

June 13, 2014 THE TWO-YEAR GAP Scott Johnson The IRS has informed the House Ways and Means Committee that it has lost Lois Lerner email messages from January 2009–April 2011. Harkening back to the allegedly accidental erasure of 18 1/2 minutes of critical Oval Office recordings that contributed to Richard Nixon’s resignation from office, the IRS attributes the loss of Lerner email to a computer crash.Some email survives: the agency retains Lerner email to and from other IRS employees during this period. The IRS claims it cannot produce email written only to or from Lerner and outside agencies or groups,...

The Obama administration, after failing to get gun control passed on Capitol Hill, has resorted to using its executive power to try to put some in the firearms industry out of business, House Republican investigators say. The assertion is included in a report recently released by California GOP Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Citing internal Justice Department documents, the committee concluded that the administration used a program known as Operation Choke Point to target legal companies that it finds “objectionable.” The program was started in 2013 to protect consumers by “choking” alleged fraudsters’...

President Barack Obama kicked off a campaign to promote new restrictions on U.S. power plant emissions on Saturday by tying the fight against climate change with efforts to promote better health for children and the elderly. In his weekly radio address, Obama said the United States had to do more to reduce carbon emissions so that children suffering from asthma and other related ailments did not face further problems as a result of polluted air. Obama said the new guidelines would reduce smog and soot that threaten vulnerable populations such as the young and the aged and he said up...

For the past few weeks, the Obama administration has been the focus of attention as allegations of widespread corruption within the Department of Veterans Affairs continue to surface. All across the United States, employees in VA hospitals are accused of cooking the books and altering medical records to make the hospitals appear to be better than they actually were. Meanwhile, our military veterans were forced to languish in endless waiting lists, many of whom died while waiting to see a doctor for the first time. President Obama was briefed on this back in 2008 and even though he pledged that...

Trying to get details

Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki resigned Friday, after more than a month of battling criticism about access to care and tampering with official wait lists at VA health centers. At a meeting with President Barack Obama, during which Mr. Shinseki presented the VA's internal findings of improper scheduling procedures and long wait times across the VA health system, the retired general offered to resign to give a new VA leader the chance to fix the systemic problems at the department. His resignation marks his second departure from public service since his career began in the military in the...

There seems to be a belief among some true believers on the Left that the executive branch is pretty much sewn up for the foreseeable future. Ms. Clinton will waltz in on the heals Mr. Obama and take over the expansion of the state, the expansion of the “progressive” state, in 3 years time. Though Congress my not be owned by the Dems, the White House the progressives are positive will be for a long time, and so the tools of the executive branch should be employed in a partisan and purely political way.Of these tools the IRS is perhaps...

Lois Lerner’s stepmother thinks her war-hero father would be proud By Richard Johnson May 16, 2014 | 2:22pm Lois Lerner, the IRS official held in contempt of Congress on May 7, is a proud American and the daughter of a war hero, according to her stepmother. Svetluse Kramosilova Lerner, 73, said Air Force Major Martin Lerner — who died in 2008 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery — “would be very proud of Lois for standing up to Congress.” Lerner invoked her Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination and refused to answer any questions about the IRS targeting of...

This video seems to show Lois Lerner discussing the pressure she is under to target conservative groups Lois Lerner speaks at the Sanford School of Public Policy on October 19, 2010. This video was released in 2013; but as the cover-up continues, it’s important that people understand the pressure surrounding Lois Lerner in the lead-up to the 2012 election to target conservative non-profit groups. The most important question to ask is, “Where was this pressure coming from?”