re: Ok, walk me through IRS email situation...

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Nikole Flax, whose emails the IRS “lost”, sure visited the White House a lot. pic.twitter.com/T7PAp1KSsr

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The hard drive will only contain data that was stored on her computer but never left via email.

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Not true at all.

They use the same setup we use here at my office. They use an Exchange server with people having their mailbox on the server and an archive file (PST) on their computer. Once their mailbox hits Exchange's default 500MB limit, an automatic message is generated from the server to the user telling them they are over the limit.

User calls the helpdesk, helpdesk walks them through moving enough emails to the archive file that it brings their Exchange mailbox below te 500MB limit.

So yes, it's quite plausible that when her drive crashed she lost all of her old emails. The direction of focus should now be on:

1. Does the IRS do backups of their mail server? If so, how long do they keep those backups?

2. Was Lerner's computer brought in at any time between 2009 and the time the HDD crashed to be backed up and re-imaged?

3. Does the IRS mail server logs go back to 2009? If so, pull the records for whom she emailed and who sent email to her from the DOJ and WH then go subpoena those peoples' emails.

4. Does the IRS use a virtual desktop environment? If so, do they have backups of the user VM's? If so, how far back do they go?

5. Hard copies of all of her DOJ and WH correspondences should have been made and kept. Where are they?

6. Carter Hull's testimony implicated William Wilkins. What's the status of his emails?

Even if the hard drive crashed, it's almost an impossibility that entire server backups as well as individual mailbox backups do not exist, period. I would be willing to be that the federal government is archiving EVERY e-mail that leaves or enters their e-mail servers, and holding every one of those e-mails for several years. It's hard to envision a scenario where my small business has a better DR/backup plan than the federal government.

On another note, does anyone think that excuse would work for Americans being audited by the IRS? That you lost your hard drive and all backups that contained your records, therefore you should be excused?

I agree. You can argue about the likely hood of one set of circumstances all you want. But when you look at the big picture, 6-7 individuals all mysteriously losing emails from the same time frame (which was only a few years back), its absolutely absurd.

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On another note, does anyone think that excuse would work for Americans being audited by the IRS? That you lost your hard drive and all backups that contained your records, therefore you should be excused?

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I have a client under audit from 2011 currently and he called me yesterday and told me to tell the IRS that his computer crashed and records are gone.

Problem is... IRS and tax law REQUIRE you to keep records to substantiate what is income and what is an expense for a number of years, and not producing said record is cause to deny a deduction.

Remember, it's the IRS. Heads they are right, tails you are wrong.

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From what I've read, the discussion of the hard drive crash has been put out on the internet. The flow comes across as legit based on my experiences dealing with the exact same issue. With that said, I can give (very grudgingly) the benefit of doubt on Lerner's archive, but there's no way in hell that all 7 of these hard drives went belly-up for the same time period.

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Even if just Lerner's hard drive did die and her PST was a total loss, I'd bet my house that the data is still archived somewhere. There are hardware and software based archiving solutions that store a copy of every e-mail, incoming or outgoing. I don't think it's too far of a stretch to assume that the federal government is using such a solution to archive everything for years to meet their own retention guidelines. Flat out lies are being told by this government, plain and simple.

People keep asking, "Why did it take a year for them to come forward with this information?". My sneaky suspicion is that it took that long to make sure that ALL the backups had been wiped...

They couldn't come out and say, "Oops. Ms. Lerner's hard drive crashed. They have had a year to make sure that all copies of all of the e-mails were destroyed. I have a feeling that none of the normal backup channels will work, either.

It is hard to imagine a scenario short of overwriting, reformatting or zeroing that would cause the data loss to be unrecoverable.

Even with a corrupt file system, that info is still on the disk...........it's just that the operating system doesn't know how to find it. Assuming the data isn't then written over, this is one of the more common and easily fixed scenarios.

If it is a mechanical failure, most permanent data loss that is experienced is usually isolated. In other words, you aren't going to lose 2+ years worth of emails. The good folks at Popular Mechanics wanted to see how resilient data could be on HDDs so they performed a test. They smashed a drive with a hammer multiple times, threw it in a bucket of muddy salt water and let it sit there submerged for 4 days. They were able to recover %100 percent of the data from that drive.

I think the problem most people are having is that they ARE relating it to personal experience. "My drive crashed. I used a drive recovery program. It didn't work. My data was unrecoverable". WRONG! It "might" have been permanently lost, but until you send it to a lab (which could cost you thousands) and hear that from them, I'll reserve judgment. Bottom line is that most people would not even consider personally spending thousands to recover a drive. That isn't even an option for most, but that is a far cry from saying something is simply unrecoverable because YOU couldn't do it.

My point is that total lose of emails on a HDD archived over a 2 year period is highly unlikely. Even more unlikely is that it happened to 5-7 others around the same time.

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Lerner being swiftboated

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FIFY