Why are we still going on and on about a stupid hard drive? That hard drive is unimportant. What matters is where are the network and tape backups should have copies of ever single piece of IRS email traffic going back several years? That is the scandal here... The IRS appears to have destroyed or hidden vast amounts of mission critical data!
Well for one the IRS is sticking to the “Back up tapes are erased after 6 months” story line. I don't think it is so much about getting to the bottom of the Hard Drive issue to extract the emails. What we have is 10 or more IRS officials working in concert to cover their abusive tracks. There had to have been some foot soldiers politically aligned in the IT Dept. to pull this off. Keep applying the pressure, maybe someone cracks and takes a plea deal and blows this thing up all the way to the White House. Issa / Gowdy, whoever is in charge, should be subpoenaing the Nuts and Bolts IT Guys whom would have physically worked on these PCs. LET THEM SWEAT.