Posted on 06/24/2014 9:52:31 AM PDT by raptor22
Scandal: The IRS canceled a contract with an email storage contractor weeks after Lois Lerner reported lost personal files and before other IRS officials had their hard drives crash as Tea Party-targeting investigations began.
Timing is everything, the saying goes, and sometimes the timing of events is also very curious, as in the case of the lost emails of Lerner and at least six other officials at the very same time the IRS canceled its contract to back up and preserve those emails as required by federal law.
Lerner's computer supposedly crashed in June 2011, an alleged event the IRS concealed from the American public and congressional investigators for two years.
This event, which cannot be verified because her hard drive has since been destroyed and recycled, occurred just 10 days after House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rep. Dave Camp first wrote a letter asking if the IRS was engaging in targeting of nonprofit groups.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
1. SonaSoft is a software company.
2. Were they in charge of the backup system. Managing it? I don't know.
3. Was SonaSoft providing any hardware, any servers? I don't know.
4. Some and perhaps all of the backup servers were IRS machines running Microsoft software.
5. The standard operating system for PCs was XP. Do we know what kind of software was running on the servers? I don't know. Perhaps it was SonaSoft. Perhaps it was a mix of SonaSoft and Microsoft.
Given that bit of partial information, why would the “conspirators” fire SonaSoft?
Speculation: The SonaSoft IT guys would quickly spot any attempt to delete E-Mails from the backup systems and so they had to go.
Still just a repeated assertion.
They maintain that 7 hard drive crashes (coincidentally, 7 people who are targets of the committee) destroyed all traces of a very specific subset of emails permanently. Setting aside how laughable the assertion is, that means other emails, along with other records, would still be available to show the servicing of these 7 computers.
Somehow, they haven’t been able to produce those, either.
Good point, and worth repeating.
It is going to be either one of two things to come out of these IRS hearings.
(1) People are going to jail.
or
(2) The complete loss of confidence in our government.
I see no other choices.
That idiot Carl Berstein said Watergate was a bigger scandal.
this is amazing. The IRS, people who put terror in every person irrespective of who they are or famous they are, turns out to be the most politically corrupt dept in existence.
The IRS should be shut down. It must be shut down. Income tax is illegal and immoral. Anything would be better. Flat tax or better yet a user tax. Everyone would pay into a user tax.
Or both...
WHO CANCELLED it!!
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Cancellation (or termination as its known in contracting terms in the federal government) is a very rare occurrence. Usually its for (1) cause (i.e., poor performance by the contractor) or (2) convenience of the government. Either way, there should be a good document trail authorizing the IRS contracting officer to end the contract. Nobody does something like this without lots of approvals and a host of reasons. Never ever.
While contracts may expire at the end of each option year or at the end of the full period of performance, it doesn’t sound like that was the case in this instance.
Issa needs to call up someone from the contracting office who was responsible for that contract and start asking probing questions. It will be a revealing exercise.
Captain Obvious strikes again.
IRS SCANDAL PING
Whoever is entering keywords, please include “irs” as well as ones like “irsscandal”. A search on “irs” will not find “irsscandal”.
I dont even need to know anythign about lois lerners hard drive
emails are not stored on her hard drive
they go through an email server
The question is WHAT KIND OF EMAIL APPLICATION are they using, and where is the server.
This is a potential ticking time bonb for them... They focused so much on HER hard drive failing that they are forgetting that the SERVER is where the emails are stored.
Go to any computer and pull up Outlook email- you can see your emails no matter what device you are on.
If they try to blame her hard drive, and then say “oh the server hard drive crashed too” then start jailing people until someone hands them over, because they are lying
At this point I’d be subpoenaing emails from Office of Chief Counsel and all of its 3,000 employees too.
There definitely should be a written contract specifying in detail what service Sonasoft was to provide, especially if they were to provide backup for a limited number of employees as Koshkinen claimed.
Oh, I know the hard drive is irrelevant. It's just that not only is it a bad lie to anyone with any level of technical competence, they can't even pretend to substantiate the lie.
From the article: “As John Hinderaker points out on his Powerline blog, it makes sense that Sonasoft might have deleted records it was no longer obligated to keep and that indeed it may have felt it was required to do so.”
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Not so. Under normal circumstances, it would not make sense.
Most government contractors have clauses that require the contractor to turn over all data like this. Just imagine if each federal contractor (and there are thousands upon thousands of them) simply deleted the information they were contracted to collect and store for the government? No, the federal government almost always WANTS the data they paid for and there are standard FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulations) contract clauses included in contracts for that purpose.
If its one thing the government is good at, its collecting data. All that data is used to justify a lot of jobs and defend budgets. Also, as we’ve seen, information is power.
IBD EDITORIAL PING
I would like to question some of them as to what happened to their emails. Surely not all the computers in the Washington office suddenly crashed all at the same time as the 6 computers in question.
If no one else had their computers crash and had their emails destroyed, then somebody is hiding something.
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