[Girlene]

ABC Round Table on IRS scandal.

Greta doesn’t think this is a phony scandal. Doesn’t think someone deliberately destroyed the emails based on the timing of when it happened and when this became an issue...but she does think there’s plenty of smoke that they took so long to let anyone know about it.

Keith Ellison - it’s all a distraction.

[kabar]

I don't understand how Greta can come to that conclusion. In addition to the Camp letter that was sent to Treasury 10 days before the Lerner computer allegedly crashed, there was an ongoing IG audit that was underway on the targetting of conservative groups. Lerner had to know that. She had ample motive and opportunity to cause her hard drive to crash, e.g., reformat the hard disk.

Much has been made of the fact that contemporaneously, Lerner sent emails to the IT folks requesting recovery of her data. This is supposed to indicate that there was no malice of forethought. However, Lerner could have done this as part of the cover-up and to ascertain how successful she had been in deleting the material.

And as we all know, backups are done at least daily in the federal government, archived, and sent off-site. I spent 36 years as a federal employee. There is no way two years of emails and other documents can be lost by the crash of a computer on a network or even a server on the network. I hope the dumb Reps have enough sense to get the best IT folks inside and outside government to use a resource in investigating this. It is time for a select committee at the very least.

I was very disappointed by the GOP questioning of Koskinen at the hearing. It was embarrassing and feckless.