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THE LATEST ON LOIS LERNER’S “LOST” EMAILS, WITH A BOMBSHELL AT THE END
Powerline ^ | 6-16-2014 | John Hinderaker

Posted on 06/16/2014 8:29:36 PM PDT by smoothsailing

June 16, 2014

THE LATEST ON LOIS LERNER’S “LOST” EMAILS, WITH A BOMBSHELL AT THE END

by John Hinderaker

The Internal Revenue Service claims, as of last Friday, that two years’ worth of Lois Lerner’s external emails are gone forever. You can read the letter in which the IRS told Senators Hatch and Wyden that Lerner’s external emails from 2009 to 2011, the critical time period for the IRS’s effort to suppress conservative nonprofits, have been lost, here. The letter is signed by Leonard Oursler, National Director for Legislative Affairs. If you keep reading, you eventually will get to the part about Lerner’s emails.

The IRS describes its system for storing emails. As I noted here, emails reside in user accounts on email servers:

The IRS email system runs on Microsoft Outlook. Each of the Outlook email servers are [sic] located at one of three IRS data centers. … For disaster recovery purposes, the IRS does a daily back-up of its email servers. … Prior to May 2013, these backups were retained on tape for six months, and then for cost efficiency, the back-up tapes were released for re-use. In May of last year, the IRS changed its policy and began storing rather than recycling its backup tapes.

Yes, I’ll bet they did! This is almost incredible. But wait, it gets worse. It turns out that each IRS employee, even senior managers like Lois Lerner, have ridiculously little space allotted to them on the un-backed up email servers:

Due to financial and practical considerations, the IRS has limited the total volume of email stored on its server by restricting the amount of email most individual users can keep in an inbox at any given time. …

Currently, the average individual employee’s email box limit is 500 megabytes, which translates to approximately 6,000 emails. … Prior to July 2011, the limit was lower, 150 megabytes or roughly 1,800 emails.

These are absurdly low limits. By way of comparison, the Power Line Gmail account currently contains 12,437 megabytes of material–83 times as much storage as was permitted to an IRS employee before July 2011. A senior employee like Lois Lerner would probably send or receive 1,800 emails in a few weeks at most, thereby exhausting (if the IRS’s account is believed) his or her allotted server capacity. At that point, the IRS reverted to manual document management. Seriously:

If an email user’s box gets close to capacity, the system sends a message to the user noting that soon the mailbox will become unable to send additional messages.

Given the tiny mailbox capacity, this must happen every few days.

When a user needs to create space in his or her email box, the user has the option of either deleting emails (that do not qualify as official records) or moving them out of the active email box (inbox, sent items, deleted items) to an archive. … Archived email is moved off the IRS email server and onto the employee’s hard drive on the employee’s individual computer. As a result, these IRS employees’ emails no longer exist in the active email box of the employee and are not backed-up as part of the daily backup of the email servers. Email moved to a personal archive of an employee exists only on the individual employee’s hard drive.

If this is true, it means that the IRS’s record-keeping is utterly inadequate. It has no systematic record of the decisions made and actions taken by IRS employees. Within six months, all centrally located and accessible email records–which, in today’s world, means more than 90% of the relevant documents–are gone. Records of the agency’s actions exist, after that time–if they exist at all–only on individual desktop or laptop computers, from which they cannot be accessed or reviewed in any efficient way. And forget about hard drive crashes, what happens when an employee gets a new computer, or is replaced by a new employee with his or her own computer? Are emails systematically copied from one computer to another so that the IRS will have a record of what the employee has done, assuming that the employee took the trouble to archive them in the first place? I doubt it.

My opinion of the federal government’s efficiency is not high, but I find it hard to believe that this is really how the IRS manages its records. I am not a tax lawyer, but I assume that any corporation subjected to an IRS audit, or any other kind of government investigation, that had this lousy a system of preserving records would be crucified.

That is all very interesting, but the question remains: did Lois Lerner really lose the only copies of her 2009-2011 emails in a hard drive crash? In its correspondence, the IRS tried to prove the point by attaching an email thread in which the agency’s IT professionals sadly advised Ms. Lerner that they had been unable to recover her missing files. But if you read to the end of the thread (i.e., the beginning) you see Lerner’s email of July 19, 2011, in which she laments the loss of “personal files” due to her computer’s crash, but never mentions any lost emails. Click to enlarge:

LernerEmail0449

It is remarkable that Lerner does not say: “Oh no! My hard drive crashed, and the IRS’s only copy of two years’ worth of my highly important work has been lost!” No: she is concerned about “my lost personal files,” because “there were some documents in the files that are irreplaceable.” That is a clearly stated and entirely reasonable concern, but it has nothing to do with losing the agency’s only record of two years of work.

If this is the best the IRS can come up with, it has much more explaining to do.


TOPICS: Computers/Internet; Government
KEYWORDS: irs; lerner
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To: smoothsailing

If I were Congress (Republican, at least) I would go after Leonard Oursler, National Director for Legislative Affairs. He was stupid enough to put his name to the nonsense, so I would make him own this lie. When it is proved that losing 2 years of e-mails is a lie, I would nail him for lying to Congress.

Throw him in jail and strip him of his pension. Then watch him name names!


41 posted on 06/16/2014 10:23:21 PM PDT by Cowboy Bob (They are called "Liberals" because the word "parasite" was already taken.)
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To: Billthedrill

Nice post, Bill, and to the point.

We all appreciate it.

CA....


42 posted on 06/16/2014 10:24:28 PM PDT by Chances Are (Seems I've found that silly grin again....)
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To: ClearCase_guy

Hells bells, NSA is recording everything else- Just ask the NSA for copies /semi sarcasm

As to them thinking we are really stupid, they actuallynever think of us as other than drones or slaves, probably do not care what we think.


43 posted on 06/16/2014 10:35:37 PM PDT by Nailbiter
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To: Billthedrill

Yep.

I was going to explain how email works, but there are enough of us who know this an outright lie.


44 posted on 06/16/2014 10:46:46 PM PDT by Vendome (Don't take life so seriously-you won't live through it anyway-Enjoy Yourself ala Louis Prima)
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To: Ray76

Issa and his committee

There’s an office at a university that assists the disabled and handicapped. It took me a while to figure it out, but eventually I was able to determine that their focus is less upon helping, uh, retards as it is protecting the university from liability.

Think about that for a while.

OK. How many criminals like Lerner has Issa’s committee nailed.
Take your time ...
The answer is “zero” isn’t it?


45 posted on 06/16/2014 10:51:20 PM PDT by tumblindice (America's founding fathers: all armed conservatives)
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To: Ray76
Issa needs to hit them hard and stop belly aching.

Issa is a compromised, weak, contemptible POS.

We should bookmark this post.

It is a 100% certainty that ISSA will only give a little lip service -- only words.

"When" the collapse happens I pray that ISSA's name will be on a list of those who have committed high Treason against our Republic.

Swift and merciless justice must be to all those who stood by and let our Republic be destroyed.

46 posted on 06/16/2014 11:25:55 PM PDT by sand88 (We can never legislate ourselves back to Liberty)
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To: Billthedrill
No public or private company that has ever been involved in any dealings with the IRS compliance people would design a system that handles business correspondence records that poorly. Bring the IT people before Congress and see how quick you can find someone who knows where that data can be found. It's on a backup or in a server somewhere unless it was intentionally disappeared. In that case, there is an audit trail that can point to who disappeared the data.

Any IT person who stands behind this story is incompetent or complicit in the cover-up.

47 posted on 06/16/2014 11:27:43 PM PDT by eggman (End the Obama occupation of the White House!)
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To: jwalsh07

Bumping this post.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3168632/posts?page=19#19

And a HA! to this one!

You are absolutely correct!

Those emails are out there. Do you suppose they really think we are that dumb? Does Boehner think we are that dumb?

I’m not going to speculate any further than that but, boy howdy, I surely could.


48 posted on 06/16/2014 11:34:52 PM PDT by dixiechick2000
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To: Nailbiter

Screw the NSA; you men to tell me there is not a single hacker out there that can’t get into the IRS electronic files, regardless of how hidden they are?


49 posted on 06/16/2014 11:35:40 PM PDT by 5th MEB (Progressives in the open; --- FIRE FOR EFFECT!!)
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To: 5th MEB

should have said “you mean to tell me”.


50 posted on 06/16/2014 11:37:18 PM PDT by 5th MEB (Progressives in the open; --- FIRE FOR EFFECT!!)
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To: 5th MEB

where or where is snowden when you need him ?s


51 posted on 06/16/2014 11:59:58 PM PDT by Nailbiter
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To: Kenny
Yes, they need to man up, seize the servers, locate off-site backup location and lock it down.

You would think that that was in the works already, buuuut.....
52 posted on 06/17/2014 1:48:44 AM PDT by 98ZJ USMC
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To: Bryan24
....but the IRS explanation pretty much defies belief.

In Hillary's own words "that would require a willing suspension of disbelief."

53 posted on 06/17/2014 3:32:00 AM PDT by Gaffer
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To: smoothsailing

The discussion of whether emails could be ‘lost’ or unavailable or uncertain is an insult to computer technology and to the professionals that run those systems.

This is the kind of holdover from the days of the 10MByte Hard drives and 8 inch floppy disks - not today. No way.

To discuss and even go through the effort to refute the IRS’ claims is a courtesy undeserved and an insult to the American people. To believe even the premise of the possibility flies in the face of truth.

Republicans should be damned pissed about this. Enough to put her ass in jail, and anyone else that even mutters the word “lost.”


54 posted on 06/17/2014 3:37:48 AM PDT by Gaffer
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To: smoothsailing

I still have email backups from 2010, from two employers ago. My email storage space was 2 GB back then, and I was in a fairly small company using low-cost Zimbra, not a bigwig for the IRS, which should have a couple huge server farms.

Considering that tens of millions of people have e-filed taxes for many years, one would think that the IRS has these electronic records saved on servers somewhere. Email storage should not be a problem for the most anally retentive of government entities. This is absolute Bravo Sierra.


55 posted on 06/17/2014 3:40:25 AM PDT by EricT. (Everything not forbidden is compulsory.)
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To: EricT.

In a legit world, we’d be seeing video footage of agents swooping in on that building and snatching evidence.

Maybe we can just use stock footage of the Gibson Guitar raid and photoshop computers into the hands of agents.


56 posted on 06/17/2014 6:41:20 AM PDT by King Hawk
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