Posted on 06/20/2014 2:07:00 PM PDT by AAABEST
The Internal Revenue Service commissioner said Friday THE AGENCY WILL NOT SHARE WITH CONGRESS ADDITIONAL DETAILS ABOUT ITS LOST EMAILS related to the ongoing tea party investigation until its own review is finished because he said Republicans are releasing inaccurate, interim information.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
They don’t risk prison. They know nothing will ever happen to them. The shot heard around the world would be if the House arrested Lois Lerner and Eric Holder for contempt of Congress, which they’ve already been convicted of.
Until that happens, they can lie and hide records all they want, and we all just dutifully get worked up over the staged drama of totally-worthless Congressional “investigations”.
It is time for the people to tell the House to either crap or get off the pot. The more you let these people get away with lying to all our faces with no consequences, the more emboldened EVERYBODY becomes, because they know that even if they are convicted of federal felonies they will never see prison time, loss of salary/benefits, or any other deterrent to these crimes. They will be emboldened just like all the other enemies of America who are celebrating in the streets at the fall of America before our very eyes.
If the House doesn’t do anything about it, they deserve all the enemies’ gloating. It’s a test of wills. If the lawful authorities let the tantrum-throwing brats defiantly moon them by breaking laws, refusing to enforce other laws, and crapping all over the Constitution.... then the brat is just being a brat, and the parent/authority who will not assert their authority is enabling the brat.
We need to tell the House this. Somebody has to be an adult and actually stand up for the rule of law. Until the big brats Lerner and Holder sit in jail, the “parents” are a laughingstock and the brats are in control.
Thank you for answering! That was driving me mad.
I guess the NSA will have to be contacted.
What do you mean by “recycled”? They are required to keep/archive backups. If they dumped what was in their server every 6 months they were required to dump the data all onto some kind of secure long-term storage from which the data could be retrieved for FOIA requests and/or criminal investigations, etc.
Are they claiming that they broke the law by not storing backups as required?
Evil in control in the current administration. And not many seem to care. Sadder day ahead for our nation.
I’ll post this from http://libertyunyielding.com/2014/06/17/irs-manual-explicitly-governs-email-backup-retention/ Not sure if the clickable links will transfer here so you might have to click to go to the site for that feature:
fter the revelation that Lois Lerner’s emails went missing when she spilled coffee on her laptop (I made that part up), I began wondering what type of email infrastructure the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) might be using. Surely, as with nearly every other government agency, all email is stored in a centralized server using something like a Microsoft Exchange platform or equivalent. The messages in your inbox are simply a reflection of your messages as they exist on the server. This model exists for the express purpose of preventing data loss and providing universal access.
For example, I could lose my laptop or the hard drive could catch fire but it doesn’t matter, my emails are safely stored externally on a server somewhere in a data center. That server, undoubtedly, is protected by numerous fail-safe methods such as drive mirroring, daily (if not hourly) backups of data, and the ability to be replicated and restored should that server itself fail or suffer hardware damage. In short, there is no conceivable way that an entire chunk of emails from a specific period in question have gone entirely missing simply because a desktop or laptop computer “crashed,” as the IRS put it.
Luckily, you don’t have to go further than Google to learn a little something about how the IRS expects employees and their own internal information technology department to handle email and other sensitive data. Do a little searching and you’ll come across something called the Internal Revenue Manual, or IRM. This publication includes information divided into thirty-nine parts, which are then subdivided into hundreds of sections and subsections governing every single aspect of the tax-collecting agency.
Of particular interest to me were the sections on email guidelines, data archiving, and security compliance. According to Part 1, Chapter 10, Section 3, “Standards for Using Email,” there is in fact an email archiving procedure in place. In subsection 1.10.3.3.1 of Section 3 title Don’t Slow Down the System, the manual instructs all IRS employees to refrain from sending large attachments since they will be archived with the message and will eventually fill up the server causing performance issues as well as headaches for systems administrators.
Refrain from sending large attachments to work groups or audiences. Remember every email message and any attachments, embedded graphics and photographs require a copy for each Exchange server store where each recipient’s mailbox resides. [Emphasis added]
Instead store the document on an IRS public web archive or SharePoint repository and insert a hyperlink into the message. Ensure the permissions allow access by all recipients prior to sending the message.
This confirms that the IRS is in fact using the Microsoft Exchange platform for email within the organization. We’ve affirmed that all email is in fact being stored on external servers outside an individual desktop or laptop computer of any particular user.
The next question concerns whether those email servers are being backed up and maintained pursuant to other sections of the IRM governing data backup and security. Luckily, Part 10, Chapter 8, Section 60, Subsection 10.8.60.4.4, explains how data backups occur with regard to the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 (FISMA).
System/Application Backups
All FISMA-reportable systems and applications and non-applications (as defined by FISMA) shall be backed up in a restorable format on a regular basis, encrypted, and stored offsite. [Emphasis added]
Frequency and type of backups shall be defined in the Operations/Customer SLA and documented in applicable SA&A documents.
Why does this matter, you ask? It’s very simple. FISMA governs the retention and storage of government data, specifically including email and all other electronic correspondence. Simply put, under the banner of FISMA, the emails of Lois Lerner, which were stored by the IRS on an Exchange server store, should have been backed up externally at regular intervals as governed by FISMA. A simple crash of a laptop or desktop computer should not be enough to erase sensitive communications from an individual at the highest levels of a major government agency.
Furthermore, as also required by FISMA and implemented by the IRS according to the Internal Revenue Manual, items such as email must be archived in a way that is easily retrievable in the event of data loss or as needed during a criminal investigation.
Based merely on these small sections of the massive IRS manual, there are only two possibilities with regard to Lois Lerner’s missing emails.
1. They’re gone due to a simple laptop or desktop computer hard drive crash. This must assume that IRS information technology personnel were not following their own set standards for data retention and security. In this case, more heads should be rolling as there may be federal law violated by an agency which is not in compliance with security policies laid out in FISMA.
2. Lois Lerner, in collusion with personnel at the IRS, is lying.
In either case, there is far more to this story than a hard drive crash.
Read more at http://libertyunyielding.com/2014/06/17/irs-manual-explicitly-governs-email-backup-retention/#z6pE0Pc8blLLmFYV.99
Get their current hard drives and see if the installed dates match the fail dates. Are there any files with time stamps before the original drive failed. All those drives failed and NONE could be salvaged? Pretty poor effort to restore.
No one brought this up and I can’t understand why? Explain to me why no asked if she had personal backups? No sane person in any position of authority doesn’t backup to portable drive or usb device. There is no way any reasonable person would not backup other files or trust 2 years of work product to an aging hard drive.
Not one person has asked if she or an IT person had made back ups to other devices and I can’t fathom why? She should have lost not just emails, but spreadsheets, word docs, presentations, etc.. etc.. I call bull on no other backups.
I’ve said this before: This is as a direct result of the amateurish pursuit of this case by Issa.
Issa has no law degree. He is a serious-appearing guy, but the failure of this effort is sabotaging him, badly. He insists, for whatever reason(s), upon acting like an attorney in terms of educing facts from witness testimony. This is an absolutely critical litigation skill and if misapplied or ineffectively done, allows all manner of evasion to go on. This is not “fair play” because the other side spares no effort nor expense in paying for legal skills as it tries to deflect from the investigative effort led by Issa. And the clever way to deflect not only deflects, it establishes the questioner and his effort as mis-—something. Misapplied, mistaken, misguided.
Levin went into this in the first hour of his show today.
Issa does not realize the damage he is doing and that is the central crux of my point here. Any skilled atty would have physically impounded those drive from the beginning: and maybe those drives had crashed at that juncture. (that possibility being utterly irrelevant to whether or not these emails are retrievable; any IT expert knows full well these emails are retrievable) What it does, it shows, nay, it PROVES, that the investigation is being handled by an amateur. Infinitely more skilled attys immediately detect this failure to seize evidence and proceed to lay every trap that Issa has walked into since that first day. Because he does not know enough to know he is being played and is dutifully walking into every trap the other side lays. The end result is going to failure on a colossal scale.
Likewise, on the other scandals into which Congress has held hearings, nothing ever seems to result. Why is that? It is because the event is kabuki theater, it is grandstanding by pretend-attorneys who do not have cross-examination skills. So we get “Thank you for your service” when these people have been paid handsomely for their service and have their pensions paid for and it’s not like they risked any broken bones or anything. But the point is that the more the questioning sessions lead to nothingburgers, the more it appears that any one investigation itself is bogus.
The hard drive was sent to a forensics lab.
The hard drive was recycled.
Which is it?
I would rather be nuked than locked up in a prison until I die.
Could it be possible to get to Ted Cruz with all the info that has been shared here and ask him to please sit Issa down and give him instructions on cross examination?
Gowdy would be my strong preference, but the point is "real lawyer, real litigator".
Sure, it would be "possible", but the person to "get to" would be Issa, IMO. I am sure either one of Cruz or Gowdy would be more than willing to confer and even to write out lines of questioning; but what we are seeing is reluctance on the part of Issa....and I say that because of what I've already stated, and he is furthermore proving it with his actions: If he, Issa, is not savvy enough to see that he is blowing it and is to this point failing to confer/take interrogation lessons from Gowdy/Cruz, after being roundly deflected 2-3-4 times in prior hearings, then he must not be smart enough to to go confer with those guys right now, today. And he is therefore also not smart enough to see the cumulative damage his getting skunked is producing.
He may have been a very successful businessman, but he ain't a lawyer and he's frankly not savvy enough to understand what he is doing. He's much more a blue-collar guy, if you look at his background. And that is no criticism, my point and my alarm is that he is doing serious damage, unwittingly, because he is (only) a pretend lawyer and he THINKS he knows what he is doing. And he doesn't. This is ego. He thinks he can go up against Harvard-grade New York-grade attorneys who are without question advising and running the other sides' playbooks and rehearsing their lines...while Issa ISN'T "rehearsing his". That is not a winning strategy. He isn't a lawyer of >>ANY<< kind, yet he thinks he can do battle with top-drawer REAL lawyers. He's going to get smoked, but what is worse, REAL top-grade attorneys will be able to twist this right back onto Issa by having his own incompetence (as a lawyer) serve to discredit not just him, but the investigation itself.
The most magnificent strategy in litigation is the ability to have the court construe your case (as plaintiff) into a structure that you actually end up suing yourself.
If you [generic you] are not smart enough to see that you are blowing your case, then you ought not to pretend you're a lawyer...and if you *have been* pretending you're a lawyer, you should STOP and seek professional help, as we say.
I’m sure they do. It us also possible to destroy the evidence, which I suspect they did. Either that or use a private email service, like Gmail.
Ok, fine. We need a rule that the IRS may not ask for records older than six months.
I think anybody in IT would be shaking their heads at the reports coming from the investigation. It is rather hard to believe there would be an official policy to store .pst files on workstations that weren't getting backed up. I'd certainly would like to hear some explanations from some of the more senior It people..
Anyone interested in this specific point should listen to the first hour of Mark Levin’s show from 6/20.
This is just a guess on part. Since they were dealing with confidential tax information, they probably aren't allowed to backup to local devices. Most of the work would likely have done on a secure file or database server. Generally speaking you don't want rank and file doing their own backups anyway..
I mentioned an IT person (they don’t follow normal IT protocol if a hard drive crash loses emails forever). What I don’t get is that email is only a small portion of the of a typical management job. There had to be word docs, spreadsheets, proposals, written policies, presentations, job reviews, resumes, etc.. etc... We are expected to believe that you lose a hard drive you lose everything?
If all her documentation was backed upped on a file server, so was her .pst file. No IT person is stupid enough to backup everything but email (even if this seems a little redundant if they were using a mail server). You can never have enough backup.
Now they claim at the time that emails were stored on a backup tape for three months. And that tape was destroyed. If this is true why didn’t they immediately recover her emails from backup when the hard drive was replaced? Why even attempt to recover the files off of the hard drive? They had an intact backup at the time the crash. Their explanation makes absolutely no sense.
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