Posted on 07/22/2014 3:10:50 PM PDT by kristinn
Washington, DC – Despite early refusals to make available IT professionals who worked on Lois Lerner’s computer, Ways and Means Committee investigators have now learned from interviews that the hard drive of former IRS Exempt Organizations Director Lois Lerner was “scratched,” but data was recoverable. In fact, in-house professionals at the IRS recommended the Agency seek outside assistance in recovering the data. That information conflicts with a July 18, 2014 court filing by the Agency, which stated the data on the hard drive was unrecoverable – including multiple years’ worth of missing emails.
“It is unbelievable that we cannot get a simple, straight answer from the IRS about this hard drive,” said Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI). “The Committee was told no data was recoverable and the physical drive was recycled and potentially shredded. To now learn that the hard drive was only scratched, yet the IRS refused to utilize outside experts to recover the data, raises more questions about potential criminal wrong doing at the IRS.”
It is also unknown whether the scratch was accidental or deliberate, but former federal law enforcement and Department of Defense forensic experts consulted by the Committee say that most of the data on a scratched drive, such as Lerner’s, should have been recoverable. However, in a declaration filed last Friday by the IRS, the agency said it tried but failed to recover the data, but is not sure what happened to the hard drive afterwards other than saying they believe it was recycled, which, according to the court filing means “shredded.”
Further complicating the situation, the Committee’s investigation has revealed evidence that this declaration may not be accurate. A review of internal IRS IT tracking system documents revealed that Lerner’s computer was actually once described as “recovered.” In a transcribed interview on July 18, IRS IT employees were unable to confirm the accuracy of the documents or the meaning of the entry “recovered.”
“It is these constant delays and late revelations that have forced this investigation to go on so long,” Camp added. “If the IRS would just come clean and tell Congress and the American people what really happened, we could put an end to this. Our investigators will not stop until we find the full truth.”
Background:
After the Supreme Court released its January 2010 decision in Citizens United, the IRS spent three years responding to Democrat complaints and calls to stop activities of conservative groups. The IRS in Washington, DC took these complaints as marching orders to subject Americans to harassment for their beliefs by subjecting applicants to extraordinary delay and inappropriate questions, audits, and by making their confidential tax information public.
At a May 10, 2013 legal event, Lerner admitted that the IRS had targeted conservative groups for extra scrutiny based on their names and policy positions. Initially, President Obama vowed to work with Congress to “get this thing fixed.” Likewise, upon assuming leadership of the agency, IRS Commissioner Koskinen said his goal was to “find problems quickly, fix them promptly, make sure they stay fixed, and be transparent about the entire process.” Unfortunately, the Administration’s professed eagerness to help Congress investigate the targeting quickly waned and it began obstructing the Committee’s investigation.
The most egregious recent example is the delay in notifying Congress of Lerner’s lost emails. On June 13, 2014, over 13 months into the investigation, and one month after the Committee was promised it would receive all Lerner emails without qualification, Congress learned that potentially thousands of Lerner emails were destroyed by the IRS. The IRS purportedly notified Congress in a letter sent to provide an update on the pace of production. Buried in the third attachment of the 27-page letter was the revelation that over two years’ worth of Lerner’s emails to and from individuals outside the IRS were lost due to an apparent computer crash that occurred in mid-2011. In later correspondence with the Committee, Treasury and the White House admitted learning of the lost emails in April 2014, two months before the IRS informed Congress.
The Committee immediately began investigating the matter. On the following Monday, the IRS’ Deputy CIO told staff that the agency was unable to retrieve information from Lerner’s malfunctioning hard drive, even after sending it to experts at the IRS’s Criminal Investigations unit. When pressed by investigators about any other computer issues, the IRS admitted that six other IRS employees involved in the political targeting also experienced computer crashes.
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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.
It's intentional.
Have you ever heard the term “digging your own grave”
Everyone knows they are lying and that they have tried to destroy the evidence
This charade is simply documenting the ongoing cover up and stonewalling. Congressional investigators have allowed them to build up a track record for criminal convictions even if they never find any of the missing data.
In Watergate the cover up was said to worse than the crime.
With the IRS scandal, it seems that the crime was much worse than the cover up, but the IRS id working hard to reverse that dynamic to make sure that the ongoing cover up is at some point much worse than the crime.
Like Obutthead said yesterday, when you try to keep investigators from the crash site, it looks like you are trying to hide something.
That is really great. The jokes make themselves up with Team Obama
Sounds like Congress is more interested in what was on Lerner’s hard drive than HER EMAILS ON THE SERVER!!!!!
Yeah, like the history of the yahoo email accounts she was using to circumvent document disclosure policies
She might have had a POP3 setup for some reason. Like if she needed the evidence to be quickly lost or destroyed?
This is such lying nonsense it is ridiculous to anyone who’s ever been in the I/T industry."
That is not necessarily true. I'm not %100 certain...but, if the IRS is using MS Exchange on the backend and Outlook 2008 or 2010 then it IS possible that emails are stored locally. Cached Exchange Mode (a default setting) will sync most if not all content in a users mailbox to C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\mailboxname.ost This file lets a user navigate and "use" their Outlook mailbox while offline, changes can be made (calendar appointments/unread status/build draft emails/create tasks/etc) and then those changes can then be propagated up to the server. If there was a catastrophic error on a local machine, data COULD be recovered from that file. We still never really got what the definition of "computer crash" is...an unbootable machine? a corrupt Windows install? HD errors? All these things can be construed as a "crash" in our dumbed-down, void of details culture.
But besides all that...I still don't understand why server side backups haven't been able to be found or restored.
Yes, I’ve worked a couple places where we had inbox quotas and archived old emails to our personal network drive or (if we had quotas on our network space) hard drives.
But the emails were also archived to tape. It was just a real pita to retrieve it from there.
What matters here are the NARA rules. If they were being followed then the emails should be stored on tape.
True on that. There is also the possibility of an implementation of an Exchange archive solution; where the message CONTENT for everything 90/180 days old gets archived off Exchange except for the message stub. So depending upon the enterprise setup...there is ANOTHER location for older/archived messages.
Yes, emails should be on the server.
Whatever was on that hard drive was far more incriminating than the emails, so it had to be ‘destroyed’.
There are fairly obvious problems with putting IRS data into the cloud. I sure hope they never do it.
“It is unbelievable that we cannot get a simple, straight answer from the IRS...”
No it isn’t.
If this is true - that the HD was only scratched - then someone is going to jail. Even this administration can’t lie their way around this.
I think you're far too optimistic. These things only move forward when the media publicizes them.
Well I “scratched” my hard drive and now no one on Earth can see anything on the Internet anymore. Same level of stupid as the story they’re trying to peddle.
Fair point.
So, at the direction of the boss, this corrupt agency destroyed incriminating evidence.
Jail time!
I couldn’t care less about her hard drive. All emails are stored on servers. Where is the server data? It is there, yet, people keep being distracted with her hard drive.
I'll bet my tax data isn't erased after 6 months. I'd be willing to bet they have decades and decades of my tax data. These people are morally corrupt and think nothing of protecting themselves at all costs via all manner of nefarious means.
For what it's worth, I retired from a large (20k staff) technology corporation 6 years ago and all communications and work files were up to the individual employee. There were central repositories, but it was up to each individual to select and initiate such storage. Team projects were handled the best, with emails the worst. However, in the fast world of technology, things are extinct in a couple of years and long-term archival procedures just didn't make much sense in that world.
Wow, just wow!
I wasn’t suggesting the IRS do that, it was just a flippant comparison! ;-)
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