Posted on 07/14/2014 6:44:42 PM PDT by smoothsailing
July 14, 2014
The Federal Election Commission recycled the computer hard drive of April Sands — a former co-worker of Lois Lerner’s — hindering an investigation into Sands’ partisan political activities, according to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Sands resigned from the Federal Election Commission in April after she admitted to violating the Hatch Act, which bars executive branch employees from engaging in partisan political activities on federal time and at federal facilities.
The twist is that Sands also worked under Lois Lerner when the ex-IRS agent — who is currently embroiled in a scandal over the targeting of conservative political groups — worked at the FEC’s enforcement division.
In a letter to FEC chairman Lee Goodman, Oversight chairman Darrell Issa and committee member Jim Jordan laid out Sands’ partisan activities and asked for records pertaining to the recycling of her hard drive and of the agency’s records retention policies.
Sands took part in a heavily partisan online webcam discussion from FEC offices and also operated a Twitter account with the handle @ReignOfApril which were sent during Sands’ normal working hours.
One of Sands’ tweets, from June 4, 2012 read “I just don’t understand how anyone but straight white men can vote Republican. What kind of delusional rhetorical does one use?”
Sands is a black female.
“Dear every single Republican ever, When will U learn that Barack Hussein Obama is simply smarter than U? Stand down, Signed #Obama2012 #p2,” Sands wrote on May 1, 2012.
In a message fro Aug. 25, 2012, Sands called Republicans her “enemy.”
In others, Sands issued fundraising pleas on behalf of Obama. “Our #POTUS’s birthday is August 4. He’ll be 51. I’m donating $51 to give him the best birthday present ever: a second term,” she wrote on July 18, 2012.
“The bias in these messages is striking, especially for an attorney charged with the responsibility to enforce federal election laws fairly and dispassionately,” read the Oversight letter to Goodman, an Obama appointee.
The FEC’s Office of Inspector General sought to conduct a criminal investigation into Sands’ activities but were stymied when they found that the agency had recycled her computer hard drive.
“Therefore the OIG was unable to show that Ms. Sands’ solicitations and political activity were done from an FEC computer,” reads the letter.
Because of this, the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia declined criminal prosecution.
“The FEC’s failure to retain Ms. Sands’ hard drive prevented the FEC OIG from fully pursuing appropriate criminal sanctions for Ms. Sands’ admitted violation of federal law,” wrote Issa and Jordan.
“Like the IRS’s destruction of Lois Lerner’s hard drive, the FEC’s recycling of Ms. Sands’ hard drive may have also destroyed material responsive to Freedom of Information Act and congressional oversight requests,” the letter continued.
Lerner’s computer hard drive crashed in the middle of 2011, right around the time that questions were being raised over whether the IRS’s enforcement agency was targeting conservative non-profit groups while considering whether to grant them tax-exempt status.
News of the loss of Lerner’s emails was only made public last month, much to the frustration of Issa and the Oversight Committee.
Though it is unclear whether Sands and Lerner communicated after Lerner’s move to the FEC, the Oversight Committee letter points out that Lerner was known to have communicated with other FEC employees after her switch. That correspondence included the sharing of information protected by section 6103 of the tax code, the letter notes.
LOL!
Big Mama Moose looks like more than a hand full to me, those straps have to be super strong.
They could both learn from her. :-)
Working for the DoD, with a contracted computer system, we had ‘non contract’ external hard drives go belly up more frequently than they should. We got so we only plugged them in for backups, then unplugged.
The ones left plugged in all the time seemed most at risk.
The tree of liberty needs watering, real bad.
Indictment, prosecution, imprisonment....otherwise it’s all just a joke.
Man, those emails are elusive little devils.
Would it be easier for Congress to ARREST everyone in the government?
Fixed!
I’ve got battery cables and a nice Group H8 (REALLY BIG) car battery at the ready.
DEFUND AND DISBAND THE IRS
Odds are now at 1 in 38900000000 that this could happen.
There’s going to be a whole lot of emails “go missing” and computers crashing all over the District of Corruption between now and January 2017. It’s that “transparency” thing that dumb Josh Earnest, the Jay Jay Carney wannabe, was talking about.
The odds are more like 234 billion to 1 that all 8 hard drives failed and not one had any recoverable data at all, but hey , as Lerner correctly observed, “stuff happens” so the explanation is “perfect”
This does not however, explain why the data was not recovered.
Lerner and the other 7 or 8 people involved were in VERY high level positions, the analog of a corporate President or VP in the private sector and mission critical data that a company has a legal duty to preserve is stored on those drives.
The hard drive is replaced and the data from the archived back ups is retrieved and the data is loaded on the new hard drive and restored onto the computer within a day or so of the failure .
In the case of the IRS the emails were doubly backed up.
First the email on the e mail server was backed up by the email back up system and archived.
Second, the emails were downloaded onto the computer and were archived by the incremental back up system that preserved the downloaded email data resident on the hard drive.
As soon as the hard drives went down, the drives would have been replaced and all of the data from the multiple back up systems by IRS IT people within a matter of days, if not hours to restore everything that had been on the hard drives at the time of failure.
If anything from email was missing, it would be reconstructed by the IT team from the totally separate e-mail traffic logs showing who and where incoming and outgoing e mails were directed.
To think that multiple Officer level employees of a multi billion dollar organization such as the IRS would have hard drive crashes and lose years of data without having it restored is simply insane - how could they have kept doing their jobs for the last several years without their emails or the data on their hard drives.
There is absolutely no evidence that there was any corresponding disruption of job duties of any of the officials in question due to such a massive and improbable data loss.
Looks like the 0bama FEMA camps will be filled with corrupt Federal employees
Yeah..what are the odds?
....They didn’t reload all the emails sitting on the server so she could keep on working tasks without missing a beat?....
Isn’t this the most ridiculous excuse you have ever heard?
Of course all or most of her data would have been recoverable from data backup servers.
No office could continue to function if all the data on your computer was lost. You would be incapable of conducting your business.
In reality a good investigation will reveal that she was given a new computer and her old data was just reloaded from the backup server.
Anything else is all lies.
...here is absolutely no evidence that there was any corresponding disruption of job duties of any of the officials in question due to such a massive and improbable data loss.....
You have stated the problem expertly. I have worked in government for many years, and have had computers fail.
A call to the IT office would initiate a work order and a tech would show up, fix the computer or replace it and then as I watched, reload all my data including emails on the spot.
Only then would they sign off the work order as being fixed and close it out.
You do not lose much data when your hard drive fails, especially your emails.
Yes and nothing will be done and no one will be held accountable.
Gooooollllly. Surprise, surprise, surprise!
Bookmark
Some of them should have become public figures by now.
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