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When will someone point out that emails are NOT stored on employees' local hard drives in larger companies (like the US government). Emails are stored on a central email server (such as an exchange server).

According to their IT policy, they had a size limit on user Exchange/Outlook mailboxes. So if the mailbox got full, the user would have to clean it up, by doing one of two things - 1.) archive old emails (they wanted to save) or 2.) delete them entirely.

Archive emails can be placed on the local hard drive/ outlook folder and do not get synced or backed up to server.

My theory is that in June she archived every damning email from the server down to her hard drive. And then destroyed her hard drive. But!! The emails would have still been part of the 6 month backup tapes, as they are simply snapshots of every mailbox on the Exchange server. But they admitted they didn't restore using the tapes. And once 6 months expired, they were gone. Very conveniently.

That said, an IT investigator expert could still locate every email by the way of log files, address book (who did she send emails to, and subpoena them all), blackberry server and logs, ISP files/logs, purchase orders of storage media (drives/thumb drives/CDs), names of every IT person and their logs who worked on hard drive and installed new drive, etc.

Lerner headed a 900+ person department. How many assistant dept heads, admin assistants, and secretaries read and filtered her e-mails, snail mail, reports, memos, telephone logs, and the rest of the paperwork that leviathan requires to function. Copies of all relevant documents are sitting in plain sight in those offices or have already been copied in defensive moves by the career civil servants in her unit. The first defense, “it was some people in st. Louis that done the dirty deed.” That let everyone know that they were potential fish food.

Start with the departments internal phone book, id the the people on the periphery, their work flow, what they handled, document procedures and so on up the various chains of command.

Who handled Lerner’s calendar, paper or e-docs, meeting schedules, meeting memos. All this is published in some form or another and sits in multiple places. Participants and recipients, all have their own chains of comms and docs.

All of this on top of the IT logs, trouble tickets, vendor contacts.

Give me authority, 20 retired FBI document specialists, a platoon or two of techs, side-arms, and crates of pre-signed warrants, subpoenas and I run through that department like a chain saw through ice cream.