I presume the plaintiffs will tell the court this was a “bull account”, not a “full account”. “Er, your honor, we can’t produce the evidence because we deliberately destroyed it”, just doesn’t seem adequate.
Plaintiffs should petition the court for answers to these and other obvious questions:
Names, titles, contact info of personnel who did the “recovery” work = ?
Names, etc., of everyone gave them instructions = ?
Written instructions?
Date “crash” incident first reported?
Recovery efforts performed when?
Produce all communications involving the files, recovery, etc.
Were the personnel involved aware of the FOIA requests and subpoenas for the documents on the “hard drives”?
Detailed explanation of efforts made to recover the files from other sources — servers and message recipients = ?
Did Lois Lerner or others involved use Blackberry devices, or other computers, phones, etc. to communicate about or matters related to the FOIA requests and suits?
Where are those communications?
Why did the IRS pay for a data backup service if they didn’t use it?
Why did the IRS suddenly cancel that service?
From the article: “An IT specialist who had been there since 2007 and received regular IT technical training, inspected the laptop and “determined that the hard drive on the laptop was not operating properly.”
The specialist tried to recover data but “all of the … efforts to recover any data were unsuccessful.”
That’s what the person who filed the report with the court said, under oath.
So the next step is to call in that IT specialist who had been there since 2007,” put him under oath and see if his testimony is consistent. He should, for example have an insight as to whether the drive had crashed, or was just wiped clean before he got it. Put him under oath and let’s see exactly what he found when he got his hands on the drive. Who knows? He might even admit under oath that he did the erasing himself. After all, someone did a pretty good job on it somewhere.
Lois certainly was, she was seeking to communicate in ways that circumvented the FOIA requests...