Posted on 07/22/2014 5:32:34 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Does the IRS actually have their backups for e-mail from the period when Lois Lerner and her group targeted conservative groups for extra scrutiny on tax-exempt applications? The agency claimed a month ago that it overwrote the tapes every six months, in one of the most notorious (and unsuccessful) Friday afternoon document dumps ever. New testimony from one of the IRS’ top lawyers released last night by the House Oversight Committee casts doubt on that story (via Instapundit):
The IRS might not have lost the backups of former agency administrator Lois Lerner’s emails after all, according to top IRS official.
In testimony released Monday, Thomas Kane, the IRS’s deputy associate chief counsel, told House Oversight investigators last week that the agency was examining whether all back-up tapes which held the emails have been recycled.
The IRS told lawmakers in June that the tapes had been recycled, one of the reasons that an untold number of Lerner’s emails were missing. Since then, the IRS commissioner, John Koskinen, has repeatedly stood by those statements in congressional testimony.
But Kane, the top IRS official in charge of producing documents for Congress, said on Thursday that: “I don’t know if there is a backup tape with information on it or there isn’t. I know that there’s an issue out there about it.” …
In the transcript released by Issa, Kane also insists that the IRS believed that the tapes had been recycled when it told Congress more than a month ago that it couldn’t recover all of Lerner’s emails. He doesn’t say why that might not be the case anymore.
At some point, this begins to look like trolling. We have them! We don’t have them! We may have them, but … er … we don’t know!
(Excerpt) Read more at hotair.com ...
Wonder how “sanitized” these newfound e-mails have become?????
As an IT engineer for the last 20 years, I can tell you with 100% certainty that I would lose my job if I could not produce an archive from the last 7 years. I’m allowed to take a few days to produce, as we often have to send away for tapes from Iron Mountain; but that data is understood to be recoverable. We’ve been able to go as far back as 10 years in some rare instances if tapes were not overwritten or were archived with scratch tapes.
This business about the government not being able to produce documents from just 6 months to 1 year ago is absolute bunk and borders on criminal withholding of evidence.
....now that the backups have been sufficiently scrubbed.
IRS = Dean Smith’s “4 Corners” offense.
Reminds me of minutes of deleted cassette tapes from the White House, during Richard Nixon.
In other words obstruction of justice.
“...borders on criminal withholding of evidence.”
I think they crossed that line.
All that was needed to be done to preserve the emails was to pull one set of full backups once the subpeona was received and replace the set with fresh tapes. There were many things that could have been done, but weren't. For what appears to be obvious reasons.
No major corporation in the US would retain LESS than 7 years worth of data. This 6 months garbage is a ruse. It’s not real.
How much do you want to wager that if some Democrat concocted a case about Bush and demanded emails from 2007-2008, they’d have those records readily available in every format imaginable?
> ....now that the backups have been sufficiently scrubbed.
Or completely rewritten in Hollywood script style. It would be easy to fake and be made to look “real” to non-experts. If the so-called “recovered” emails are reviewed they need to be examined by an unbiased third party expert to determine their authenticity.
IRS: “Now that we’ve had sufficient time to flush all of the incriminating e-mails, we found the back-ups!”
Delay tactic. There are no backup tapes, or at least none will ever be produced. Let’s not get our hopes up on this.
Sort of like a "Certificate of Life Birth" that was of interest a while ago.
Exactly. Coworker: “Lois, how is your day going?” Lerner: “Oh just wonderful. I love being an ethical public servant doing my job to serve the people.”
Like almost everything our government leadership does that comes under scrutiny, I don’t care which party, we will never know the truth.
I hope they find somebody better at producing phony emails than who they found to produce a phony birth certificate.
Same here. 32 years.
This whole thing would be laughable if it was not so serious. This isn’t saying “my dog ate my homework.” It’s saying “My goldfish ate my homework.”
I’m not disagreeing with you. I am saying that, in my opinion, the IRS changed internal IT email retention policies (that are legally mandated) to age these emails off. To me it shows just how serious the content of the emails must be.
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