Posted on 06/23/2014 4:10:32 PM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
Q. Even if Ms. Lerner’s hard drive crashed, how could her emails have just disappeared? Weren’t they backed up?
A. Apparently not, at least not permanently. Before it changed its storage policies last year, the I.R.S. backed up emails onto old-fashioned tape drives. Every six months, it would reuse those tapes, thus erasing the previous batch.
Q. Oh come on. Really? Even my Gmail account archives everything.
A. Many government agencies and big corporations still use older email systems that aren’t in the “cloud” the way that Gmail is. They may have tens of thousands of employees, as the I.R.S. does, making them slow to modernize.
Q. These I.R.S. investigations have been going on for more than a year, and Ms. Lerner’s hard drive crashed three years ago. Why are we just hearing about these lost emails now?
A. Republicans in Congress want to know the same thing.
Q. What is the White House saying about all of this?
A. Last week Jay Carney said “We found zero emails – sorry to disappoint – between Lois Lerner and anyone within the E.O.P. during this period,” he said, using shorthand for the Executive Office of the President.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I read the article. It’s the “we’re incompetent” defense.
Lerner’s taking the Fifth is a bigger barrier than it first appeared, because she can’t be asked what her memory is as to who she emailed. If she could, their computer drives and servers could be searched. But, if she answered the question honestly ( a stretch, I know) she’d be a dead woman, not walking for long.
Q: Will the New York Times print anything that remotely runs counter to the administration narrative that this was just a horrible mistake?
A: No way in Hell.
“Last week Jay Carney said “We found zero emails – sorry to disappoint ... “
Equivocation and sarcasm—he’s not saying they don’t exist, just that `we’ didn’t find any, and phony regret.
Lyin’ looser.
Did Lerner have a Blackberry or smart phone, synced to her email?
If so, her emails are on other servers.
The IRS should be held to the same record keeping standards that they impose on taxpayers. If any business under IRS audit gave the lame excuse that their records just happened to be lost by a hard drive crash and that there was both no back up and the physical hard drive just happened to be destroyed, the executives would be under quick indictment for obstructing justice, plus any other punishment the IRS could come up with. IRS officials should all be tried for obstructing justice.
She pleads the 5th and all her emails are destroyed.
This is 2014. Only a fool would believe this lie.
Appoint a special prosecuter charge them with obstruction then make them give their excuses in court to a jury.
Truly unbelievable. Government at all levels has offsite backup of emails. If they were erased by someone, it must have been that someone wanted to expunge a trail of dirty tricks.
I’d expect nothing less from the NYT, but this is not going to fly either. It’s sweet sounding bullshit, but it’s still bullshit and nobody is going to believe it any more than they believed the Watergate erasures.
Those emails will be found, their backed up in multiple places and no “dog ate my homework” excuse will change that reality.
There's nothing to see here... we have asked all the probing questions the Republican Party wanted asked, and here are the best answers you will get because we are professional journalists and it is our job to do what we have done and report the facts.In FIFA World Cup Action today...
By taking the 5th and burying the computer no one really knows what actual Email address she used for these critical communications. It could well be something other than a government provide address. There are endless free accounts available.
What needs to happen is the IP address of her office/computer needs to be searched at all the free Email hosting companies and find all the Email addresses used by her/office. If found then all the Emails and who they were with can be found too.
There are potentially all kinds of possibilities of where they are, the ones you mentioned, the email recipients, the back up service the IRS used then conveniently terminated etc.
These all need to be subpeonaed by a special prosecutor.
BTW great tagline
While I would love for these emails to be found and made public it simply won’t matter in the end.
These people, all of them, operate above and outside of the law and absolutely nothing will happen to anyone. They could have video tape of Obama and Lerner actually planning out the targeting of Tea Party groups and it STILL wouldn’t matter. NOBODY WILL BE PUNISHED FOR THIS... EVER.
It really is the case that ONLY we peasants must obey the law.
Evidently “Congress” isn’t involved, only “republicans”.
Q. Why do Congressional investigators want the emails?
A. Republicans say they want to determine whether the I.R.S. continued to delay applications..........
A huge portion of the article is the last question, when the democrats get their big response.
Not necessarily. Blackberry servers and the like don't usually keep any mail on them after it's been forwarded. They just provide a conduit between the exchange server and the Internet access to the cellular wireless network. It comes in and goes out without being stored permanently.
Not with NAT-ed addresses they won't. Not likely.
A: Horse s-
If she had a Blackberry, I see options.
First of all, the local server at her office may not save the content of her emails, but it should log date/time/recipient of emails - and all of her recipients’ computers could be searched.
But also all of the Blackberry traffic goes through RIM’s (or whatever the name is now) servers in Canada. There is the same opportunity for logging there. And, twice I had to wipe my OS from my Blackberry...after re-install, over a period of hours my personalized settings all came back. I assume info on my Blackberry had been saved on RIM’s server and automatically retrieved. Seems there is a chance emails were saved there too.
And if she’s got an Android (smart phone), good grief. In order to use the thing for anything useful, you have to set up a Google Store account...and once that’s done, I guarantee Google has at very least data-mined every email...and probably saved them all...no GMAIL account required.
It just boggles my mind that somebody who was genuinely looking for an electronic trail could not find anything.
And it boggles my mind that the IRS is apparently not bound by the same rules of civil procedure that the rest of us are? In the civilian world, you don’t just have to save the email...you have to save emails in a specific manner that makes them searchable. But the IRS can just delete the backup tape....after 6 months? I really just can’t believe that.
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