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On Friday, Mac Slavo reported on Congressman Darrell Issa's (R-CA) statement in which he called the Internal Revenue Service's claim that Lois Lerner's hard drive crash resulted in a loss of emails "ridiculous." Most of us know that information from crashed hard drives can be recovered, though it costs a lot of money. However, as Mac pointed out, we could simply obtain a copy from the National Security Agency since they are collecting this kind of information. But something more telling has come to light: The IRS uses as an email archiving company to back up its emails. That's right,...

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The timing is not merely suspicious, it is damning. [T]he alleged disappearance of Ms. Lerner's hard drive—and the fact that the missing conversations are those the former IRS director had with people outside the IRS—has suddenly resurrected, with force, the explosive possibility that she was chatting with Democrats who mattered. There's plenty of reason to believe she was. Just last week Congress discovered (via a subpoena to the Justice Department) emails showing that Ms. Lerner had conversations with Justice prosecutors about investigating conservative nonprofits. Who else in the Obama administration was Ms. Lerner talking to? I'm omitting all of the...

We have been told Lois Lerner lost 2 years worth of emails due to a crash of her hard drive. We were told the disc had bad sectors and the data could not be recovered.  According to documents provided by the IRS, Lerner was archiving her e-mails on her local hard drive, which developed fatal problems (bad sectors) in the middle of June 2011. The data proved unrecoverable despite heroic efforts on the part of the IT staff.  Let's delve into this a little deeper. Exactly what is a hard disc sector? In computer disk storage, a sector is a subdivision of...

BILL HENCK: INSIDE THE IRS, PART 4 William Henck has worked inside the IRS Office of the Chief Counsel as an attorney for over 26 years. We posted his personal account, including his testimony to a retaliatory audit conducted by the IRS against him, this past February in “Inside the IRS.” We followed up with part 2 in May and part 3 earlier this month. When we posted the second of Bill’s two items in May, I called and wrote IRS public affairs to ask for any comment the agency might have. None was forthcoming; the agency declined to respond....

A Congressional inquiry into the targeting of Tea Party and Conservative organizations by the IRS has revealed that thousands of emails from IRS head Lois Lerner and at least six of her subordinates have been lost to history after the hard drive which stored them was reportedly thrown away. The loss of the emails makes it nearly impossible to track down and verify what actually took place and whether or not the Obama administration was directly involved in the harassment of independent groups that didn’t agree with the President’s political platform.Without the emails their is no accountability, despite the fact...

Only one problem: the Office of Management and Budget issued a memo August 24, 2012 reminding federal employees that President Obama signed a directive on November 18, 2011 that offered specific guidelines as to the handling of records (see memo page 3 below).

Friday at the daily briefing, White House press secretary Josh Earnest repeatedly dismissed concerns over Internal Revenue Service claims that two years of Lois Lerner's emails are lost forever as "conspiracy theories." "Turns out that there have been 13 months of multiple congressional investigations, including 14 congressional hearings, 30 interviews with IRS employees, 50 written congressional requests, and 750,000 pages of documents, and all of that has done nothing to substantiate false Republican claims of a broader political conspiracy," Earnest said.

Scandal: One of the seven people, including Lois Lerner who lost emails from the period of Tea Party targeting by the IRS, served as chief of staff to former IRS head Steven Miller. She also made 35 visits to the White House. The funny thing about emails is that they are never orphans. When you send one, there's always a recipient who has his or her own copy. The "lost" Lois Lerner emails had recipients. How about subpoenas to all of them during the Tea Party targeting period? That should help find what we need to know — or maybe...

The Internal Revenue Service commissioner said Friday THE AGENCY WILL NOT SHARE WITH CONGRESS ADDITIONAL DETAILS ABOUT ITS LOST EMAILS related to the ongoing tea party investigation until its own review is finished because he said Republicans are releasing inaccurate, interim information.

My parents didn’t spend much time warning us kids about vandalism, petty theft or mail fraud, but much was made of the attention and focus we would need as adults when it came to our finances, because the Internal Revenue Service could pounce at any time. “If you ever get audited” were chilling words that frightened me, as I was certain I could never, ever produce the requisite documentation to defend myself and would be mortally ashamed when I had to suffer the legal consequences. My mother, who ran her own business, lamented the time it took her to copy...

In his first Congressional appearance since news of the lost Lois Lerner emails, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen was alternately attacked by Republicans and praised by Democrats who apologized to him for his treatment and called the investigation an “endless conspiracy theory” by Republicans. Under oath before the House Ways and Means Committee, Koskinen restated what Congress had been told privately: that emails of Lerner and six other relevant IRS officials have been irretrievably lost because of crashes of their hard drives and servers. Koskinen defended not telling Congress in numerous previous appearances about the email losses. In those appearances, he...

WASHINGTON – Incredulous lawmakers tore into IRS Commissioner John Koskinen over the agency's claims that subpoenaed emails of ex-official Lois Lerner and other employees are gone forever because a hard drive was destroyed. “This is unbelievable," Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., angrily told Koskinen. That’s your problem. Nobody believes you.” Koskinen responded, “I have a long career. That’s the first time anyone’s said I don’t believe you.” "I don't believe you," Ryan shot back again. [...]

Republicans are still pressing the Obama administration to find missing emails from former IRS official Lois Lerner and six other IRS personnel, but the White House insists they are not recoverable. "As the IRS said, I.T. professionals worked to restore Lerner's hard drive and were unable to do so," White House spokesman Jay Carney said.

House Committee Requests Testimony from White House Official by Sharyl Attkisson on June 19, 2014 Today, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, (R-Calif.) requested that Jennifer O’Connor of the White House Counsel’s office testify next week.In a letter, Issa requested O’Connor’s appearance at a hearing on Tuesday at 9:30a, a day after IRS Commissioner John Koskinen is scheduled to testify. The Tuesday hearing is entitled, “IRS Obstruction: Lois Lerner’s Missing E-Mails, Part II.”In a series of disclosures that began last Friday, the IRS notified Congress that it has “lost” two years worth of key emails to and...

Investigation of IRS Targeting Commissioner John Koskinen testified at a House Ways and Means Committee hearing on the investigation of the IRS' criteria to process applications of tax-exempt organizations.

When the news trickled out a year ago that the head of the IRS union, Colleen ("fat and ugly") Kelley, met with President Obama the day before the agency began targeting the Tea Party, I finally saw the link. The story was picked up by many news sources on the right but did not develop any further. It's my opinion that this is the connection that the "lost" emails are trying to hide. And it's a big connection -- the White House, the POTUS, the union boss, and the government agency all collaborating, and conspiring, to thwart the actions of...

And all of them, apparently, were lost in computer crashes. That’s novel. Normally, when an agency doesn’t want to comply with a document request, it simply lies by claiming that no such document exists.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest stonewalled reporters Monday, seeking an explanation for the administration’s Friday-night claim that a computer crash wiped out all the emails between IRS chief Lois Lerner and other agencies, including the White House. “You’ve never heard of a computer crashing before?” Earnest told a reporter during a brief press gaggle while flying back to D.C. from President Barack Obama’s fundraising trip to California. “A good faith effort has been made” to find the missing emails, he said. Skepticism about the administration’s claim is “indicative of the kinds of conspiracy that are propagated around this story,” Earnest...

Republicans on Tuesday charged that the IRS has lost emails of a half dozen of its employees involved in the tea party targeting controversy, including a top aide to the now-fired acting IRS commissioner. In addition to losing two years’ worth of emails sent and received by Lois Lerner, the central figure in the scandal, the IRS “cannot produce records from six other IRS employees involved in the targeting of conservative groups,” Ways and Means Republicans said in a release. That includes Nikole Flax, who was the chief of staff for Steven Miller, the acting IRS commissioner who was fired...