The IRS Loses Lerner's Emails

Wall Streeit Journal ^ | Wall Street Journal Editorial Staff

[tedw]

The IRS—remember those jaunty folks?—announced Friday that it can't find two years of emails from Lois Lerner to the Departments of Justice or Treasury. And none to the White House or Democrats on Capitol Hill. An agency spokesman blames a computer crash.

Never underestimate government incompetence, but how convenient. The former IRS Director of Exempt Organizations was at the center of the IRS targeting of conservative groups and still won't testify before Congress. Now we'll never know whose orders she was following, or what directions she was giving. If the Reagan White House had ever offered up this excuse, John Dingell would have held the entire government in contempt.

[TomGuy]

Everybody (except probably for high-ranking members of the eGOP) knows that these emails were backed up and saved in many, many places.

Apparently, BJ Clinton and GW Bush had similar problems:

Clinton White House “Lost” Emails Too

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Emails are just so slipperly. Gotta watch'em every minute or they'll just slither away, never to be seen again -- except for those barn residual backups.

[thesharkboy]

Let’s see the records of the crash, the work orders for repairs and interview those who submitted the orders.

One crash cannot, will not, cause the loss of anything in today's IT environment. Maybe what someone is working on at the time, but certainly not work, including emails, from the day before, for example.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

I was just joking. He probably is to. The chances of the NSA working for anybody but the jackboots is nil.

[milagro]

The RNC--or whoever the Republican nominee is for 2016--needs to run an ad showing how many things the Obama administration and his party have LOST:

IRS email files

full-time jobs;

health plans and ready access to doctors;

the right to privacy of personal communication;

the respect once given our nation by both our allies and our enemies;

the lives of veterans "lost" by VA bureaucrats;

the sense of pride and accomplishment of veterans who fought and DIED to defend the principles of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" for the people of Iraq;

the security of our borders;

the trust of the American people in their leaders to speak and act in the best interests of their REPUBLIC!

[noinfringers2]

I have lost a lot of confidence in Issa really wanting to take the weeds from the garden of plenty.

[yoe]

Darrell Issa should put his big boy pants on and throw this crooked woman in prison.

[Principled]

Given the response, my bet is that the Republicans already have the emails from a whistle bower and they are just letting IRS and Holder dig themselves in deeper with the cover up

Thanks for that. One can hope...

BTW what was the response you speak of?

[LALALAW]

Where do we go from here, when there is not one word about it in the NY Times today?

Organize a March on the Times: "End Censorship, Cover IRS email lie!" "What do we want?" "Truth!" "When do we want it?" "NOW!" Make the media the story.

[stockpirate]

The government has redundant system backups, they are not on a PC hard drive.

[Pride in the USA]

How convenient, eh? More like the emails were destroyed.

[Count of Monte Fisto]

Unless the Republicans sends the House Sergeant at Arms to IMMEDIATELY arrest Leaner and the IRS officials that ‘lost’ these e-mail records then the GOP is just a culpable as the rest of them.

[MarkL]

What would happen to you if the IRS was auditing you and you conveniently lost your tax records?

I can tell you what would happen if the IRS were a publicly traded company, and were subject the the SOX (Sarbanes/Oxley) rules, which, btw, are STILL evolving, 12 years after the law was passed. The law is completely arbitrary regarding the required retention time, leaving it up to the investigators to decide how far back in time to look. Many companies, like my employer, have no idea how far back we need to keep all of our documents, so we're simply keeping them for 10 years. Hopefully a court won't decide that they need 15 years of records, at which point, we're considered to have destroyed evidence, becoming criminals.

The CEO (Lerner), CFO, and CIO would be both civilly and criminally liable for not producing the emails, and could wind up with huge fines and up to 20 years in a federal prison.

Companies subject to audits (and I thought government agencies as well) are required to have a device called an "archiver," a device that indexes and stores EVERY email that goes through the email system, whether inbound, outbound, or between users on the system. These messages are stored in an indexed database, and it would be quite obvious if someone were to try to remove messages from that database. The indexing allows one to search for messages based on sender, recipient, date & time, file attachments, any specific words in the subject line or contents of the message, and any combination of the above!

Put bluntly, the odds of actually losing email messages, between standard availability techniques (arrays, clusters), backups, and archiving, would be beyond any sort of computation. The only way this could possibly happen would be catastrophic failure of multiple devicces, in multiple locations. There is NO way this could happen, unless someone WANTED IT TO HAPPEN!

Mark

[BerryDingle]

Somewhere there is a record of the emails, unless everyone involved destroyed their hard drives.

Exactly! Tech support could bring those e-mails up in minutes, so could the web administrator(s).

[MarkL]

Lost e-mails? No problem. I’m sure the NSA has a copy. ;)

It would be cool, if it turned out that Snowden has copies of the emails...

Mark

[staytrue]

“My dog ate it.”

It’s funny. The last time I got audited, my dog ate some of my receipts and the IRS would not go for it. They charged me penalties and interest anyway.

[Kackikat]

Snowden said he got rid of all his stuff before going to Russia in that interview, but whoever is holding them has a copy, no doubt. NSA, yes they have one.

[SpirituTuo]

This same scenario happened during the second Clinton administration. Northrop Grumman was hired to retrieve all emails, especially those deleted, and did.

There are indeed backups and redundant systems, so this is just a smoke screen, a stalling tactic.

The administration’s goal is run out the clock on the public’s attention to the matter, and force Congress to spend money looking for the “lost” emails.

[MarkL]

There is a criminal syndicate running the country. It is known as “The Obama Administration”.

Not long ago, "Judge Jeanine Piro" on her Fox News show, said that as a former prosecutor, that the VA "scandal" is so wide-spread that it qualified as a "criminal enterprise," and as such, would be subject to the RICO laws, were it NOT the federal government who was behind it.

Mark

[RedMDer]

IRS thumbs their nose at the Amaerican People.

[ransomnote]

She must have emailed the very top of the corruption chain. Those emails had to be radioactive for them to do this. Their desperation proves their guilt.