At first I though that anyone who believes those e-mails were (are) just lost is either a fool or living in a parallel universe.But then, knowing what we know about Obama, it's pretty obvious that those who blindly follow him live in a fantasy land, or are just plain ignorant. Of course, this doesn't include members of the regime who are either dedicated to the ideas of Bill Ayers or are looking for personal power, or prestige.

The White House stooges at the IRS are so desperate to cover up those self-incriminating emails that they knowingly insult our intelligence for so too conveniently losing it all. And why not? They know that the Liar-In-Chief's' top felon, Eric Holder, will not do a thing about it.
In fact, the IRS could get away with collectively mooning the world on national TV and say, "Hey, those racist Republicans are just whining for political reasons." And all the media save for FOX will be trying to ignore that historic mooning.

Excellent rational discussion why this excuse is just more lies packaged in an acceptable way to many voters (who are mystified by computers).

Solution: close the IRS.
Oh, forgot, that is required as security by the banksters who created the federal reserve system to squeeze every drop of blood from the former free people of the States united.
Solution: close the federal reserve and NEVER give any central agency the power to create credit from nothing. Time to treat the banks like they have treated the people for 4 generations.

Oh, and impale Lerner on a pole on the white house lawn in view from the oval office.

This is just a typical political circus. Smoke mirrors and lies. I work making the chips that run these things, and we use a LOT of technology. I know for a fact the law requires all business to have full backup capability and records so a legal hold results in a frozen picture of the data for investigative purposes. When they started that investigation, that should have happened at the IRS as well. The fact that it didn't shows you just what the "law" means. The law only works when someone wants it to work and has the power to make it work. Obviously that is what is going on here, they do not have the power to make it work, so this is all just a huge knashing of teeth and spittle. No records will ever be found, it will always just be "baseless accusations". Move along, these aren't the droids you are looking for......

There's actually a different story here that the IRS is afraid to admit to congress... I manage a rather large division of a federal IT contracting firm, we do long term (many years) of IT services for federal / state / local governments. This is "in my wheelhouse" you might say. I'm also an expert with some 20 years of high-end enterprise clustered-systems, blade servers, big data databases, high performance systems, and huge enterprise networks of experience. The last time I touched a mom & pop shop thing was probably 1991.

The common thread I have always observed in "liberal" leaning governments - such as the feds, and the State of California I know in particular, is that they "purposefully" purge email content after 6 months. Backup tapes are shredded, anything stored at a firm like Iron Mountain is retrieved and destroyed, and yes... emails are purged from both the primary email systems as well as the shadow-copy email archiving systems (most government entities have a parallel system that everything is copied to in realtime". Some users are aware those shadow systems are there, some are not. I haven't seen direct-attached disk storage on an Exchange server in a long time in government... they usually have 5 - 7 nodes of blade servers running in parallel and cluster-attached to the same storage area network, with maybe 50-150 terabytes of storage for the email system on average. We're not talking a county clerk in Kansas here.. this is how "big government" operates in a large federal agency or a large state government.

Large mailboxes tend to corrupt on a large Exchange system when you have thousands of mailboxes... so many systems enforce a limit of like 20 gigabytes per mailbox or something like that and push users to SharePoint Team Sites or something for larger storage needs, at a maximum utilization of the 20 gigabytes per user at 25,000 users though, you are looking at something like 500 terabytes of storage needed... so at allowing say the 20 GB's to the users that will "actually" use it, versus the majority that don't and maybe only use about 2 GB, you can see that the systems would be pretty over-subscribed with a 150 terabytes of physical storage, compared to the theoretical need of 500... so those purge procedures are there...

End users tend to retain private archive files on either their local hard drive or their user-share on a network file server, but this has little to do with policy, it's more of a "CYA" type thing for decisions they make / etc.

The reason for the purge is almost always a directive from the local legal team from the agency as a defense against future lawsuits or unflattering Freedom of Information Act requests.

In a government town like Sacramento, it's rather normal for the local news stations during economic hard times to make a bunch of FOIA requests and go fishing through emails looking for evidence of people going home early and still reporting their time as present, etc.

In cases with "public facing" agencies... say... agencies that manage hydro dams that produce power and have transmission lines criss-crossing the country side... industrial accidents can and do happen. You can't be sued for something if there is no email trail to show that someone ignored a flag of something requiring maintenance (for example).

Not having the server-based email there, may very well be the case, and may very well be intentional.

Lois saying "the dog ate my email" may or may not be the case... or maybe she hit the delete button the day she resigned/terminated. Very likely as well. When an e-Discovery order is received from legal to turnover emails, high end email systems freeze the archiving scripts automatically and mailboxes are unable to delete email. This is a common feature on government systems.. If there wasn't an eDiscovery order in place on the day she quit though, if I were in her place, I'd probably delete the hell out of everything in one swipe before turned in my credentials. Just saying.

I don't support her, and I think the IRS actions here are highly biased and probably criminal and I'm sure they were not an "oops". But if I was in the same position, and knowing what I do of specific federal systems policies, and how those systems work... and also knowing she may have gotten technical advice from someone there... It would be relatively untraceable a few months out.

No one does tape backups of user workstations... that's a serious pain in the ass, and you need to realize how large storage systems are in government compared to those little tiny tapes.. We put in a 7 PETABYTE system not long ago for one of our clients. PETABYTES. Tapes are in gigabytes... and small numbers at that... you would need thousands of tapes a night to back up some of these systems. Dragging another terabyte or whatever off each of maybe 20,000 desktop & laptop computers, slow-as-snails over the 100 megabit or whatever... that would add months to a single backup job.

That is a nice collection of the case. Obama has far out done Nixon. He should at least be impeached.

I have been a professor for 16 years and have had just about every excuse in the book, including numerous computer crashes and "the dog ate my homework". However, the funniest was "The cat gnawed on my homework." I have seen my cat gnawing on my daughters' homework on multiple occasions. He doesn't like it when they do homework instead of giving him his proper attention. My kids don't understand their proper role (in the cat's mind) as the cat's staff!

I am an It professional and I will say that this article well covers what me and my work mates have been saying all along about this issue.

If I don't get a t-shirt with the church lady saying
"How conveenient, Lois" very soon, I shall surely just die. Not the Rachel Zoe way, I mean really.

Let's just say that their E-Mail server computer system did crash somehow, and the second set of RAID hard drives were also affected somehow, and the hardware redundancy did not work somehow, and they had no off-site storage plan or if they did that somehow it did not work or was affected also, and all the archived backups they made were corrupted somehow, and they lost those emails somehow, and they had not printed out any physical copies or those were lost somehow as well, and they typically do follow standard and legal processes of handling persistent and confidential E-Mails, and...

Should we forgive and forget? Would they?

Insofar as believability is concerned, when I read the wonderful red-penciled defense of Walmart yesterday I was struck by the fact that the underlying Times article was written by an alien. Not a nice "Live long and prosper" type alien, but someone whose perceptions and premises were completely foreign to me.

So, I think where 'straining at gnats and swallowing camels' is concerned, many people will accept the IRS excuses as truth, since it is from the book of politically correct doctrine.

Jan

And that outrage could, conceivably, lead to a total abandonment of the irs in favor of honest tax systems (sales & usage come to mind)...

This is obviously an attempt at a cover-up. To think otherwise is an exercise in futility. What to do, what to do?
Keep the Republicans' feet to the fire and make the calls!

Excellent article. Lots of unanswers and unbelievables

they think that they can get away with anything,
'cuz any disagreement is racism. at some point,
there will be an awakening like Yamamoto's
sleeping giant comment after Pearl Harbor. may
it start this november. -- j

I have suspected foul play, or at least gross fabrication, from the start. In my experience, SMTP, POP, and now IMAP servers are fault-tolerant. This sounds as if someone cobbled together a system from forty-year-old parts. And I find it literally incredible. And finally someone is saying what someone had to say.

Roast the bastards! This is big enough to get the entire nation OUTRAGED!

Just Subpeona the information from NSA. They collect everything.

Believing the IRS cockamamie story would require the biggest blankout in history ... or at least since "The video caused the uprising in Benghazi".