By Robert Laurie ——Bio and Archives--June 19, 2014
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Ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s crashed hard drive has been recycled, making it likely the lost emails of the lightening rod in the tea party targeting controversy will never be found, according to multiple sources. “We’ve been informed that the hard drive has been thrown away,” Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, said in a brief hallway interview. Two additional sources told POLITICO the same late Wednesday, citing IRS officials.According to an IRS spokesman,
“We believe the standard IRS protocol was followed in 2011 for disposing of the broken hard drive. A bad hard drive, like other broken Information Technology equipment, is sent to a recycler as part of our regular process."According to a variety of news sources, that means that there is no chance of attempting to recover any of the mysteriously-vanished emails from the crucial 2009-2011 period.
“Emails as Possible Federal Records,” section 1.10.3.2.3. Subsection 3 If you create or receive email messages during the course of your daily work, you are responsible for ensuring that you manage them properly. The Treasury Department’s current email policy requires emails and attachments that meet the definition of a federal record be added to the organization’s files by printing them (including the essential transmission data) and filing them with related paper records. If transmission and receipt data are not printed by the email system, annotate the paper copy. “Standards for Managing Electronic Mail Records,” section 1.15.6.6. IRS offices will not store the official recordkeeping copy of e-mail messages that are federal records ONLY on the electronic mail system, unless the system has all of the features of an electronic recordkeeping system, some of which are specified in paragraph 2 above. If the electronic mail system is not designed to be a recordkeeping system, ask an E-Mail/System Administrator to instruct you on how to copy the information from the electronic mail system to a recordkeeping system or produce a hard copy for recordkeeping purposes. IRS offices that maintain their e-mail records electronically will move or copy them to a separate electronic recordkeeping system unless their system has the features specified in IRM 1.15.6.6.2 above. Backup tapes are not to be used for recordkeeping purposes.Why was none of this done? Are why are we supposed to believe it's mere coincidence that the timeframe in which the rules were not followed just happens to correlate exactly to the time frame under investigation? Remember, there are also six more implicated IRS officials whose emails have also magically disappeared. There must be a record of these people's contact lists somewhere. If - and again this is ridiculous - the missing emails somehow did exist only on their local computers, it's now time to subpoena every single person with whom they have ever been in communication. Haul every last one of their contacts in, and demand their complete correspondence with the disgraced IRS officials. At best, you might get the complete email chain from the other person's side of the conversation. Possibly, you might only get replies, but even that should prove telling. If, however, everyone who dealt with Ms. Lerner and her allies also had a spectacularly convenient "hard drive failures" around the same time, you would know exactly the scope of the cover-up. As Darrell Issa told Fox News:
"If the IRS truly got rid of evidence in a way that violated the Federal Records Act and ensured the FBI never got a crack at recovering files from an official claiming a Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, this is proof their whole line about 'losing' e-mails in the targeting scandal was just one more attempted deception. Official records, like the e-mails of a prominent official, don't just disappear without a trace unless that was the intention."
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