Where emails are stored depends on the architecture of the email system. Typical consumer email systems which provide web access store the emails on the server. Systems using IMAP or Microsoft's MAPI protocols typically keep the emails on the server. But on systems using the POP3 protocol emails are downloaded from the mail server to the system running the mail reader and are either immediately or some time later deleted from the server.
So if Ms. Lerner and her fellow IRS employees used POP3 protocol mail readers, then it would be possible that the mail did not exist on any server within a few days of the receipt of the email. Of course either backups of the local email files, or some other email retention strategy should have been in place as required by law. And the idea that the IT folks in the IRS are so inept as to not have backups of their systems is while possible, not likely.
Needless to say both the decision to destroy the hard drive's contents, and to delete or write over backups once an investigation was underway seems highly irregular.
“So if Ms. Lerner and her fellow IRS employees used POP3 protocol mail readers, then it would be possible that the mail did not exist on any server within a few days of the receipt of the email. Of course either backups of the local email files, or some other email retention strategy should have been in place as required by law.”
Be serious — we are not talking about someone’s home emails, we are talking about the IRS!
If she was using POP3, then she wouldn’t be able to check her email anywhere other than where she happened to be logged into. I imagine someone as high up in the IRS as Lerner travels quite a bit. Even if she was using a PST file, she’d have to have it in a central server location so she could access it from other IRS locations.
The judicial authorities need to explore that level of the technology which the IRS uses.
The central point is that a hard drive is a piece of machinery and it is NOT — in itself — interesting. No one is REALLY interested in Lois Lerner’s hard drive. So, finding out the specific details of what happened to her hard drive is not (necessarily) a decent answer to the subpoena.
What is wanted is information about her EMAILS. Now, if the fact is that the emails only resided on that hard drive, then knowing the fate of the hard drive has relevance. But before we reach that conclusion, we do need to know the architecture of the email system.
A techie from the IRS needs to go under oath and explain how the IRS email works. A broad, technical explanation at the organizational level. That discussion isn’t about Lois Lerner, and it’s not about a specific hard drive which may or may not have been recycled on a specific date.
From the standpoint of the architecture of the IRS email system — WHERE do the emails reside?? Because the law says the IRS needs to keep them, and if their architecture really depends on emails being stored in a decentralized fashion on thousands of individual hard drives, then I would be AMAZED.