Author Topic: No one buying claim that Lois Lerner’s IRS emails were lost  (Read 406 times)

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rangerrebew

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No one buying claim that Lois Lerner’s IRS emails were lost


posted at 1:21 pm on June 16, 2014 by Noah Rothman

 

Last Friday afternoon, the Internal Revenue Service claimed that Lois Lerner, a former executive tasked with overseeing tax-exemption applications, lost thousands of emails after her computer crashed. Many of those emails, the tax collection agency claimed, could not be recovered.

This convenient excuse for failing to comply with a request from House investigators is not sitting well with some in the journalistic community.

“Do you believe in the Easter Bunny?” CNN’s John King asked his panel of political reporters on Monday. “Do you believe in Santa Claus? Do you believe that Lois Lerner’s emails suddenly went ‘poof?’”

King added that he agreed with Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI) who said that it was “unacceptable” that this information was just coming to light now, over a year after the investigation into allegations that the IRS targeted conservative political groups with undue scrutiny began.

“Waiting a year to tell the Congress makes me suspicious,” King said.

“It’s hard to believe in this era, where you have servers, and backup servers, and all kinds of technology that can recover all kinds of emails, that these emails simply don’t exist,” Associated Press reporter Julie Pace agreed. “If that is true, and they don’t exist, why wasn’t that one of the first things that was told to Congress?”

“I’m not sure what’s with this administration and computer problems, but it seems to be happening time and again,” Politico’s Manu Raju concurred.

 

It seems that even those predisposed to extend federal officials the benefit of the doubt are not accepting the claim that Lerner’s emails simply disappeared into thin air at face value.

In a sardonic segment on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Monday, hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough ruthlessly mocked the notion that a hardware crash could eliminate files stored on remote servers.

“Mika, even you have to admit this is pretty ridiculous,” Scarborough probed.

“Pretty ridiculous,” Brzezinski replied. “Those emails exist.”



Perhaps made uncomfortable by the implications surrounding this admission, Brzezinski quickly changed topics. It would, however, be shameful if the American political press did the same. The concession from these prominent political reporters and commentators serves as a mandate to pursue the story surrounding the IRS scandal with renewed vigor.

And those who are scratching the surface of this story are unsettled by what they are finding. In March, as Townhall’s Guy Benson noted on Monday, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testified before Congress that all the relevant email communications are “stored somewhere” on severs.

This development in a controversy which President Barack Obama called a “phony scandal” at an agency were he insisted there was “not even a smidgeon of corruption” provides reporters with the clearest indication yet that the president was either not being truthful or had been misled.

So, which is it?

http://hotair.com/archives/2014/06/16/no-one-buying-claim-that-lois-lerners-irs-emails-were-lost/
« Last Edit: June 17, 2014, 04:18:51 pm by rangerrebew »

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http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/380576/irs-has-lost-more-e-mails-eliana-johnson

 IRS Has Lost More E-mails . . .
By Eliana Johnson
June 17, 2014 11:31 AM




It’s not just Lois Lerner’s e-mails. The Internal Revenue Service says it can’t produce e-mails from six more employees involved in the targeting of conservative groups, according to two Republicans investigating the scandal.

The IRS told Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp and subcommittee chairman Charles Boustany that computer crashes resulted in additional lost e-mails, including from Nikole Flax, the chief of staff to former IRS commissioner Steven Miller, who was fired in the wake of the targeting scandal.

The revelation about Lerner’s e-mails rekindled the scandal and today’s news has further inflamed Republicans. Camp and Boustany are now demanding a special prosecutor to investigate “every angle” of the targeting. They expressed particular outrage that the agency has known since February that it would not be able to produce the e-mails requested by the committee yet did not apprise the committee of that fact, and they charged in a statement that the IRS is attempting to “cover up the fact that it convenient lost key documents in the investigation.”

If Lerner is the central figure in the scandal — Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa said Monday evening he believes she was the senior-most official involved — Flax may be an important auxiliary figure. E-mails produced in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the group Judicial Watch show Flax giving the green light to Lerner’s request to meet with Department of Justice officials to explore the possibility of criminally prosecuting nonprofit groups — at the suggestion of Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse — for engaging in political activity after declaring on their application for nonprofit status that they had no plans to do so.

E-mails uncovered by the committee last week showed that, in preparation for her meeting with the Department of Justice, Lerner and one of her advisers transmitted 1.1 million pages of data on nonprofit groups, including confidential taxpayer information, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, potentially in violation of federal law.
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It's been some time since the Congress actually asked for the emails, and now, isn't that correct?

If so, the delay between the initial request and today probably respresents the time it took to identify all of Ms. Lerner's emails, including the recipients and backups, etc. -- and then to get the word out to all the recipients to destroy all their copies, and to delete the backups (as well as the backups of the backups).

But I'll reckon that somewhere, someone who "got the memo" to delete all their correspondence with Lois Lerner decided that maybe they'd better keep them, just in case the long arm of the law ever got pointed in -their- face. Might be one or two individuals, might be a few more.

Somewhere, someone knows the truth, and has kept evidence of that truth.

The trick now is to find that individual, or individuals.

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Re: No one buying claim that Lois Lerner’s IRS emails were lost
« Reply #3 on: June 18, 2014, 01:52:23 am »
Title:
[[ No one buying claim that Lois Lerner’s IRS emails were lost ]]

Of course not.
They weren't "lost".
They were "deleted"...

rangerrebew

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IRS Was Required By Law to Print Out Lois Lerner’s Emails
« Reply #4 on: June 18, 2014, 08:29:45 am »
- The Daily Caller - http://dailycaller.com -



IRS Was Required By Law to Print Out Lois Lerner’s Emails

Posted By Patrick Howley On 10:10 AM 06/17/2014 In | No Comments


The Internal Revenue Service is required by federal law to keep records of all agency emails and to print out hard copies of the emails to make sure they get saved in the event of a computer glitch.

The IRS recently claimed that it lost 24,000 of 67,000 emails that ex-official Lois Lerner sent between 2009 and 2011, due to a computer crash. The IRS, which agreed to turn over all of Lerner’s emails to the House Committee on Ways and Means, specifically lost emails Lerner sent to other Obama administration agencies and the White House. Lerner is a major figure in the targeting scandal that has hit the IRS.

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama’s press secretary, Josh Earnest, backed up the IRS’s claim of a computer crash. The IRS claimed that it is currently working to retrieve the emails by working with the other agencies, which are not obligated by the IRS’s agreement with the Ways and Means Committee to cooperate.

“The [Federal Records Act] requires agencies to make and preserve records of agency decisions, policies, and essential transactions, and to take steps to safeguard against the loss of agency records,” said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, who subpoenaed IRS Commissioner John Koskinen Monday.

The IRS’s own definition of the Federal Records Act makes clear that emails must be saved and documented, according to an instructional page for employees on the IRS website.

“The Federal Records Act applies to email records just as it does to records you create using other media,” according to the IRS. “Emails are records when they are: Created or received in the transaction of agency business; Appropriate for preservation as evidence of the government’s function and activities; or Valuable because of the information they contain.”

“If you create or receive email messages during the course of your daily work, you are responsible for ensuring that you manage them properly,” according to the IRS. “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.”

“Please note that maintaining a copy of an email or its attachments within the IRS email MS Outlook application does not meet the requirements of maintaining an official record,” the IRS stated. “Therefore, print and file email and its attachments if they are either permanent records or if they relate to a specific case.”

Losing all evidence of agency emails, therefore, is a violation of federal law.

Even without the required printed-out copies, it appears that the IRS has Lerner’s emails saved.

 
“They’re all stored somewhere,” Koskinen told lawmakers at a March hearing, referring to Lerner’s emails.

“They get taken off and stored in servers,” he added.

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Article printed from The Daily Caller: http://dailycaller.com

URL to article: http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/17/irs-was-required-by-law-to-print-out-lois-lerners-emails/