IRS commissioner: You know, e-mail isn’t necessarily an “official record”

Hotair ^

[Steve_Seattle]

I worked for local government, and email is DEFINITELY an official record. There is NO DOUBT on that point.

[chessplayer]

THE NSA Has all emails in their vault since they are tracking everyone, so send a discovery motion to the NSA for Lois Lerner s emails.

---

And they will say,,,”we only collect metadata, not the content of emails.” And they probably wouldn’t even provide that for “national security” reasons.

[Steve_Seattle]

The Palin email thing was utterly damning of journalists. 30 or more journalists showed up to review emails of someone who hadn’t been in office for about two years and wasn’t running for anything.

[plain talk]

1. Email is correspondence and IS an official record. Ask them if there are retention guidelines

2. Regardless of the classification Email is evidence and the request is for Lerner’s emails. Why stop there? We should have all top level admin officials’ emails that might have been involved

[rights with responsibilities]

The information is on the email server(s). It may be on the hard drive....but it’s certainly on the server, which should have backups of backups, disaster recovery plans, etc, etc.

The IRS must really hold us in contempt and think we are stupid. It takes work to find this stuff....but more importantly it takes the “will” to investigate thoroughly.

We’ll see if the American people have “the will” to prosecute this to a proper conclusion. I don’t trust any politician’s words of outrage...nor their “will” to do this correctly.

[Steve_Seattle]

"Obama’s IRS top dog claims a communications gap of 1,052,000 minutes."

The press would claim that it was actually 1,050,000 minutes and that Palin was either a liar or an idiot. They would ignore her point.

[a fool in paradise]

Orwellian Nightmare PING!

[don-o]

Email is correspondence and IS an official record.

Regardless, there needs to be inquiry into the due diligence done to recover data in the immediate aftermath of the alleged crash. That was alluded to in the hearing, even to the extent of the serial number of the hard drive and the IT work tickets and names of the techs.

[PapaNew]

It’s EVIDENCE.

[shotgun]

This guy is lucky this isn’t a case in the state of Washington under the Public Records Act. The state judges have awarded millions to plaintiffs since it was enacted with broad discretion on whether the agency being sued for failing to produce in a timely manner. If the judge feels that the effort to produce was intentional and they will also consider the “attitude” of agency staff towards the requestor.

The act is very broadly interpreted even to the point that private phone texts on personal cell phones not paid for or reimbursed by an agency between officials or staff of that agency is considered public records. So are private emails and documents accessed or created from their home computers.

Granted it is only civil law and has been subject to abuse by “wronged parties” but each request is taken very seriously or should be by all governmental agencies in the state.

[shotgun]

At a minimum they should ask for the map of their computer system that shows all the desk top nodes, servers, routers, and back up systems.

[Fester Chugabrew]

You’re right, they must think we are stupid. Do they really think we expect them to work at coming forth with Lois Lerner’s communications? Her hard drive and the servers should have been confiscated years ago, but what federal agency is interested in harming its very own golden goose?

[rlmorel]

It isn’t necessarily on the servers.

Most companies only give their employees a limited amount of space to keep emails on the server so you can access those emails via webmail, etc.

The paradigm is to offload the emails from the Outlook server to your Outlook file (.pst) drive on your PC, where you can access it only when you are at your PC.

Once you download them (move them out of your inbox) into a file on your PC, they are deleted from the server. They might be able to get them back for you for a very short window after you have deleted them (maybe a day or two) but that is it.

[jetson]

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

[Kenny]

Her mail was not on her desktop. I’m with Cruz, just call them the liars they are.

[hal ogen]

These fools are typical “public servants”: arrogant, dismissive, haughty, self-absorbed, hateful and narcissistic. The criminal bum should be in prison.

[shotgun]

I don’t need a lesson on email storage and retreival. But the system map shows all the hardware and purposes for each. It a pretty simple schematic that shows the relationship between desk top user and file/email retrieval/storage!

[joshua c]

Does anybody know how to dig up some IRS email addresses?

I say we test their system.

[Utilizer]

The population of defeatists on Free Republic these days is amazing.

Quite true. I literally can not count the number of times I read a response to yet another outrage that runs along the lines of: "The deck is stacked against us. Don't even bother."

More people should bother, and get together to take our nation back from the brink.

[Lazamataz]

Ok. THAT'S IT. I work for a Federal Agency. From time to time we have Litigation Holds. In a Litigation Hold ALL RECORDS ALL EMAILS ALL SCRAPS OF PAPER ALL ELECTRONIC DOCUMENTS OF ANY NATURE

....saying again.....

ALL RECORDS ALL EMAILS ALL SCRAPS OF PAPER ALL ELECTRONIC DOCUMENTS OF ANY NATURE... MUST be preserved, under civil and criminal (felony) penalties for failure to comply.

I AM SICK TO F****** DEATH OF THESE PEOPLE LYING RIGHT AT OUR GAW DAMNED FACES!!! STOP TELLING ME THAT FECES IS CHOCOLATE AND CATS ARE ACTUALLY DOGS!!!