Posted on 07/23/2014 7:09:05 PM PDT by markomalley
Lois Lerner has become the personification of the IRS targeting scandal.
Which brings us to her infamous hard drive crash. Recall that the new IRS Commissioner first told Congress that all of Lerner’s emails were recoverable and would be provided to investigating committees.
Sharyl Attkisson has a nice rundown of this explanation.
Friday’s revelation that the IRS “lost” Lois Lerner’s emails in a computer crash came ten months after Congress first requested them and seven months after they were first subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee. But what IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testified about the emails at a hearing in March appears to be at odds with his agency’s newer reported claims that the emails are irretrievable.
Under questioning by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) on the House Oversight Committee, Koskinen said IRS emails “get taken off and stored in servers.” That was part of the reason, he said, it was so difficult to provide them in a timely fashion.
As of March, the IRS had reportedly given Congress more than 400,000 pages of documents: just not the ones at issue.
Then last month came the confounding news — delivered offhandedly by the IRS — that Lerner’s hard drive was crashed, destroyed and recycled… along with six other IRS officials at the center of the targeting scandal.
In the wake of two Federal judges putting pressure on the IRS, the tune seems to have changed once again. Lo and behold, the Lerner hard drive may be recoverable after all!
House investigators said Tuesday that the computer hard drive of ex-agency official Lois Lerner — a key figure in the IRS targeting scandal — was only “scratched,” not irreparably damaged, as Americans have been led to believe.
GOP-led Ways and Means Committee investigators, in their quest to recover missing Lerner emails, learned her hard drive was damaged but recoverable by talking to IRS information-technology experts, after the government originally refused to make them available, according to the committee.
“It is unbelievable that we cannot get a simple, straight answer from the IRS about this hard drive,” said committee Chairman Dave Camp.
The Michigan Republican said the new information also raises more questions about potential criminal wrongdoing at the IRS because the committee was told no data was recoverable and the physical hard drive was recycled and potentially shredded.
In addition, learning that the hard drive was only scratched also raises questions about why the IRS refused to use outside experts to recover the data.
With this new information in hand, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee went another round on the topic today and once again IRS Commissioner Koskinen brought his A-game of bureaucratic arrogance.
Koskinen found out about the "scratched" hard drive report from Ways and Means this morning. He gets his news the same way Obama does. #IRS
— Razor (@hale_razor) July 23, 2014
Later during today’s hearing, the House’s resident bulldog — U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) — went after Koskinen again since the Commissioner’s story has changed at least three times on the topic of Lerner’s emails.
(video at link)
Gowdy finished off Koskinen in response to a comment the Commissioner had made earlier in hearing about low morale at the IRS these days.
“Mr. Koskinen … here’s a piece of advice I would give. If the folks like Lois Lerner and others would have spent more time working on the backlog [of tax exemption applications], more time working on their caseload and less time targeting groups and less time trying to overturn Supreme Court decisions they didn’t agree with, maybe morale would be better and maybe their backlogs would be lessened.”
One gets the feeling that this story has a long way to go before we know the truth — if we ever do. The easiest way would be for the Justice Department to seriously investigate, put serious pressure on Lerner and her fellow IRS officials. But no one believes that’s going to happen.
The less we know the more it seems people have gone out of their way to make it so.
Next week there will be another round of House hearings and Fox News correspondent Doug McElway told Bret Baier on the Special Report program tonight that rumors are swirling that IRS information technology staffers are on the docket to testify.
EITHER - the WH/IRS is stalling for time -
OR - The House is now interviewing low level IT folks.
I hope it’s the second one...
No doubt the “recovered emails” will be as real as Obama’s birth certificate.
There is no such thing as “only scratched” if the drive platter is physically damaged. Has there been any confirmation? That is serious damage.
If she had large PST file, its likely going to be difficult to recover them intact, of at all. Why do they still have her HDD? It should have been recycled as soon as they decided not to do recovery. Seems odd it is suddenly showing up.
Good, that's been needed from the get go. Maybe the ITs will crack this wide open.
I just happened upon it trying to find more information on the ordeal. Wondering why someone 8 months pregnant would be online looking for strangers to have sex with. We really have becoming a depraved society. But what can you expect when the majority of America’s leaders are secular.
These same people have brought down a fire storm of scrutiny and oversight on the out of control IRS which has put an end to their plush life styles, is cutting back on their pay and may end the IRS as we know it.
Don’t forget the bounty reward for an IRS whistle-blower.
This scandal need to be resolved and those guilty placed in jail.
>>If she had large PST file,
It’s hard to say with absolute certainty with so many variations being presented by the IRS, but they appear to have been using MS Exchange therefore it would be an OST file.
Yes, it would be difficult for you and me, but there are people out there that can recover data from a drive that has been security wiped multiple times. It’s amazing what they can do.
Thanks for preserving the links and blockquotes.
Nice job of posting.
Do you think any of OBL’s hard drives were scratched in the raid in Pakistan? And if they were do you think any one in the CIA were afraid that the data was not recoverable, I highly doubt it!
My point is those hard drives were subject to most likely subject to more abuse than the one in Lerners laptop and desktop and they want us to believe this tripe!
The Steve Stockman resolution, to throw Slowist Learner in jail, has improved many memories within the IRS
Time for the gallows, b*tch
We never really worried about scratches, since it was difficult to get anything besides the head in between the platters. And you never put anything but a head in their. Granted if you screwed up installing a head, you could scratch the platter a little bit I guess, but that was why you did not got to work drunk.
And these devices are/were magnetic. So a scratch wont affect them as a scratch would affect an optical device such as a cd. Or even a mechanical device such as an old audio record. Unless the scratch was deep enough to remove the magnetic storage material.
Scratch was not a terminology we used much back in the day. Just a head crash was what we called it. And the platter would have been destroyed back then. And these devices back then had removable platters. That way you could move disk media around.
Umm... Hate to break the news to you but it’s all a complete lie. You are aware of that, right?
See post # 15
A lie. Yes. Now that makes sense and sounds like something an IRS paper pusher would say about a disk drive. It got scratched like the my movie CD at home.
No one will be held accountable.
The oppression will continue.
The Republicans in Congress will bluster and bark but do nothing.
IRS backup tapes discovered!
http://americanthinker.com/blog/2014/07/irs_backup_tapes_discovered.html
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