Helpful reply. So, this means that the US government’s official IT policy does nothing to store and protect older emails? If that is true, that needs to change.
Lerner headed a 900+ person department. How many assistant dept heads, admin assistants, and secretaries read and filtered her e-mails, snail mail, reports, memos, telephone logs, and the rest of the paperwork that leviathan requires to function. Copies of all relevant documents are sitting in plain sight in those offices or have already been copied in defensive moves by the career civil servants in her unit. The first defense, “it was some people in st. Louis that done the dirty deed.” That let everyone know that they were potential fish food.
Start with the departments internal phone book, id the the people on the periphery, their work flow, what they handled, document procedures and so on up the various chains of command.
Who handled Lerner’s calendar, paper or e-docs, meeting schedules, meeting memos. All this is published in some form or another and sits in multiple places. Participants and recipients, all have their own chains of comms and docs.
All of this on top of the IT logs, trouble tickets, vendor contacts.
Give me authority, 20 retired FBI document specialists, a platoon or two of techs, side-arms, and crates of pre-signed warrants, subpoenas and I run through that department like a chain saw through ice cream.