Ok, walk me through IRS email situation...

Phony Faux News/Koch Brothers scandal.

Not a smidgeon of corruption.

No evidence, no crime.

Please drive through.

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Phony Faux News/Koch Brothers scandal.

Not a smidgeon of corruption.

No evidence, no crime.

Please drive through.

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Bush's fault

Ann Romney has a horse

Haliburton

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Nothing. You are spot on.

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That's what I was afraid of. Good god this is astounding.

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Phony Faux News/Koch Brothers scandal.

Not a smidgeon of corruption.

No evidence, no crime.

Please drive through.

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You forgot - "Squeaky clean."

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Tell you what, if she really did this intentionally, she's not only very smart but a psychic. Here are the emails from 3 years ago when this happened:

7/19/11 Lerner emails Carl Froehlich asking if he can recover lost files on her computer.

7/19/11 Froelich emails Lerner and says they'll ask Diane. "If she can't fix it, nobody can'"

7/20/11 Lerner responds "We can only try, but it may be too late... don't they send them off to hard drive cemetery?"

7/20/11 Email to Lerner.. haven't been able to recover the data. Still trying.

7/20/11 Lerner responds "thanks for the update. I'll keep my fingers crossed"

8/1/11 Email to Lerner: As a last resort, sent your hard drive to CI Forensics

8/5/11 Email to Lerner, the sectors on the hard drive were bad which made your data unrecoverable.

8/6/11 Lerner responds: Thanks for trying. Sometimes stuff happens.

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...and how can we be sure that these are actually emails that were sent...rather than built after the fact? I mean, your whole premise is that there isn't an email server that can validate this communication, right?

Im not an IT guy, but do sectors on a HD normally just go "bad"?

I was under the impression its relatively easy to recover data from a HD short of it being physically destroying.



Still doesn't explain how the 6 other people are magically missing emails from the same time frame?

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8/6/11 Lerner responds: Thanks for trying. Sometimes stuff happens to seven computers at the same time.

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FIFY

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Tell you what, if she really did this intentionally, she's not only very smart but a psychic. Here are the emails from 3 years ago when this happened:

7/19/11 Lerner emails Carl Froehlich asking if he can recover lost files on her computer.

7/19/11 Froelich emails Lerner and says they'll ask Diane. "If she can't fix it, nobody can'"

7/20/11 Lerner responds "We can only try, but it may be too late... don't they send them off to hard drive cemetery?"

7/20/11 Email to Lerner.. haven't been able to recover the data. Still trying.

7/20/11 Lerner responds "thanks for the update. I'll keep my fingers crossed"

8/1/11 Email to Lerner: As a last resort, sent your hard drive to CI Forensics

8/5/11 Email to Lerner, the sectors on the hard drive were bad which made your data unrecoverable.

8/6/11 Lerner responds: Thanks for trying. Sometimes stuff happens.

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I'm assuming that the IRS operates like any other big corporation in today's world, at least with respect to how they operate their computer networks.

This type of stuff happens. The hard drive can go bad. However, corporate and government employees have two different ways of storing their data: the local storage, which is the computer's hard drive, and cloud storage, where the data is stored remotely on a secure server. E-mail that is sent to or from the employee is stored on the remote server, although it may also be stored on the employee's hard drive, as well (in case the employee wants to access it offline).

When her hard drive crashed, they probably tried to fix it and couldn't (or it wasn't cost effective). The end solution was that she needed a new hard drive (or new computer). Most likely, she was asking them to fix the hard drive because other items, like pictures and other personal information were on the hard drive and not stored on the network drives. As a general rule, with work computers, you put all your work stuff on the network, and the personal stuff stays on the hard drive. With e-mails, she wouldn't have had a choice, as that is stored on the network servers automatically, where it could be retrieved, if needed.

The BEST case scenerio for the O Administration is that the IRS is shown to be beyond incompetent, technically impotent, controlled by out of control people who have no regard for following policy, when the policies are hopelessly outdated and irrelevant.

In a nutshell, e-mails were removed from the server due to size limitations, downloaded to the employee's computer, which then crashed, and the hard drive was found to be "irrecovable" and recycled/destroyed, i.e, gotten rid of.

Combine that trail of events with a policy that says "official" e-mail must be printed, with the determination of "official" being made by the person involved in the e-mail.

I think you have two issues here:

1) Did someone outside the IRS tell the IRS to target the groups?

2) Was there a coverup, or was this simply horrible incompetence?

Anyone that has ever dealt with the IRS knows that horrible incompetence is certainly an option?

Did she not print the e-mails because she didn't want a copy of them, or, cause she was too stupid to know she should have?

Did the IRS not try harder to recover the hard drives because they knew there was stuff on there that might have caused issues, or because their crack IT team really thought that if they could not recover it, the data could not be recovered by anyone?

At some point, the GOP needs to turn the attention away from this singluar issue, and instead, focus on a massive, massive rebuild of the IRS.

I am not an IT guy, but the hard drive is a non-issue. The servers are the issue. The hard drive will only contain data that was stored on her computer but never left via email. We need to stop focusing on the hard drive and ask why their servers were not copied, before deleting every 6 months.