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.
Except for the authority I wouldn’t need any of that other stuff. Within the gummint there is NO authority to not answer questions of an investigating officer. The fifth amendment doesn’t apply to official business matters. No one, repeat NO ONE, had/has the right or prerogative to withold info when a gummint matter is being investigated. In a former life I occasionally audited nuclear facilities/incidents/problems. Anyone who fails to respond fully and as accurately as possible would be gone before the day was over, last paycheck in hand, and might be talking to a US Attorney first thing Monday morning.
Remember awhile back there was a brief story about how Lerner was indeed talking to investigators within the IRS——she knew she had to.
Too many people, including congresscritters, just don’t know the law or rules that apply. Someplace in the world there is an Inspector General who should be doing all the Lerner Lifting. And if that person is not performing there should be a US Marshall knocking on his door.
The risk, of course, in all this, especially to the gummint, is that regular folks get the idea that they don’t have to respond to gummint requests for anything: info, money, taxes, court dates, etc. The Kenyan has to be just hoping he can get past November with his skin on, after which his buss will be rolling over all his embarrassing acolytes.