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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

Yep.

Being in IT, I have several thoughts on this matter....

First, hard drives crash, usually at the most inconvient times. I hate it, but it's a fact of life in the business. This looks bad for the IRS, but it really could be completely innocuous.

Much is being made of the IRS's policy of only retaining emails for six months. I certainly don't agree with them on this, because they require every other American to retain documentation for seven years. However, my experience has been that - so long as the policy is applied equally, throughout the company - six months' retention is legal. Or a year. Or 10 years. So long as it is company policy, and is enforced evenly.

Now - as to her hard drive crashing... Everywhere else that I've worked has discouraged, or disallowed, mail to be saved locally on a hard drive. Specifically, for the reason that I listed above - either the company policy is to keep mail for six months, or it isn't. If you have someone - especially someone senior - maintaining their own Outlook files locally for longer than the company policy, then it opens *everything* up, legally. Opposing lawyers can subpeona everything and anything. Makes it a real PITA, especially if you're required to recover old stuff from tape (don't ask me how I know this....). Ergo - smart policy is to keep EMails on a server, not local. And, have a set retention policy, and adhere to it.

So, at the very minimum, Lerner and IRS's IT dept is guilty of poor IT policy (geez, I feel so good that they have my entire financial history on record) and destroying evidence.

That's my $0.02.

There are requirements to archive official government documents and send them over to the national archive. According to the national archivist testimony today, the IRS prints them out on paper and eventually sends them to the Archives.
Losing emails before being able to print them out and not reporting it to the the National Archives would be a violation. There was never a report made about her unrecoverable HD.