The ONLY plausible explanation if they are indeed “lost” is an orchestrated, high-level conspiracy. Flunkies in IT are not going to have the passwords to do this, it would take Big Shots - high level managers, probably off-site. So, this is not a super-duper high-tech, tin-foil hat alien spaceship type conspiracy, but the old-fashioned kind of gritty, dirty conspiracy that drug dealers and Mafia members participate in. You know, the kind that went on in the Nixon White House
BEFORE HE WAS THREATENED WITH IMPEACHMENT AND RESIGNED SOON AFTER.
So, WHO in the Democratic party is statesman or stateswoman enough to take the “long walk” to the White House????
Actually, there would be plenty of IT “flunkies” who would have the passwords for this. Anyone with Domain Admin privileges would be able to; any of the Exchange Server admins would be able to kill the databases that held the emails (and most email users, even paranoid government employees) usually keep all their emails in their mailbox. Likewise, any of the engineers who managed the backups could purge the backups of the mail store where Lerner’s emails were held. And any of the storage admins could take down the LUN where the mail store lived.
However, short of a catastrophic chain of disasters that would have set off all kinds of monitoring alarms and been a major incident, it wouldn’t all disappear. It would take deliberate action to comprehensively eliminate all instances of those emails.
The alternative, that these emails really are missing because of a “crash”, would imply that the IRS doesn’t even take the simplest of precautions, and is somehow operating their email system like a small business from the mid-1990s i.e. a single, nonredundant server that keeps the mail store on a single internal disk, with no backups. And this would be malfeasance of the highest order; a flouting of volumes of regulations on the operation of a government server environment, and would very likely carry at least as severe a penalty as the one the IRS and Lerner face for using the IRS to target groups based on political persuasion.