So Lois sends an email to the White House. Alas, because of IRS incompetence, the email is lost. Sigh! What morons!
But guess what? It's still sitting on one or more of those backed-up White House servers, just waiting to be discovered!
Of course, in the process of production and discovery, there is much opportunity for little people to act heroically in the service of the Regime. This is where the Politics of Personal Destruction comes into play. It's 2017. The worm has turned!! A Republican is President. Torquemada is AG. All those who obstructed justice are going to the can!
You’re not wrong but you’re forgetting something here, cyn: the data is only available if those who have the power to recover it are willing to do so.
As an IT engineer, I can tell you that we are beaten mercilessly by business C-level folks if so much as an email is unavailable during an investigation. We have on-site backups, cloud backups, tape backups taken to Iron Mountain, archives, data domains with VSS... the point is there’s an incredibly small chance this is true, because every company, esp. the government, has to CYA.
The only way this could be true is if a ne’er-do-well IT admin deliberately recalled tapes with this data, reanimated it, deleted it, copied over the the tapes, deleted the archives, deleted every last bit and byte of the data scratch files and stubs, and ensured that their cloud provider deleted all of the files and THEIR backups as well. That would be a monumental task for a GROUP of conspirators and nigh on impossible for a single person.