Investigators and onlookers of the IRS targeting scandal have long expected to find answers to their questions in the emails of Lois Lerner, former Director of the Service’s Exempt Organizations Division. Late Friday afternoon, the IRS announced that, due to a computer crash, it lost 2 years of Lerner’s emails to and from anyone outside the IRS, spanning from January 2009 to April 2011. Whoops.
The announcement provoked some justifiable confusion and outrage. How can a single computer crashing cause emails to go missing? Aren’t emails stored on servers? Doesn’t the IRS back up its records? Isn’t the IRS required by law to back up its records? Why did it take until now to realize that 27 months of emails were lost way back in 2011? Would the IRS be cool with it if any of us had lost 2 years of emails relevant to an ongoing IRS audit?
To begin to answer these questions, we need some experts. I don’t know a lot about government recordkeeping, so I looked for people who do. Here’s what they said:
The Blaze’s Jason Howerton interviewed IT professional Norman Cillo, who said “I believe the government uses Microsoft Exchange for their email servers. They have built-in exchange mail database redundancy. So, unless they did not follow Microsofts recommendations they are telling a falsehood.” Cillo goes on to provide a total of 6 reasons why the IRS’s story is implausible.
A DOJ lawyer wishing to remain anonymous wrote to PowerLine that “the idea that a “hard drive crash” somehow destroyed all of Ms. Lerner’s intra-government email correspondence during the period in question [2009-2011] is laughable. Government email servers are backed up every night. So if she actually had a hard drive fail, her emails would be recoverable from the backup. If the backup was somehow also compromised, then we are talking about a conspiracy.”
Attorney John Hinderaker elaborated on how emails are typically stored, saying “Emails are collected on email servers. Each user (e.g., Lois Lerner) has an account on an email server, where that person’s emails are collected. It is common for emails to be deleted from the user’s own desktop or laptop computer, but no one worries about that. When it is time to collect emails–something I do all the time in my law practice–you go to the email server and pull out the user’s entire account. A crash of the user’s computer is irrelevant and will not cause emails to be “lost. Hinderaker concludes, “The Obama administration is lying, and lying in a remarkably transparent way.”
That’s one possibility. The IRS can start to quell those worries and prove its version of the story by responding to investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson’s list of requests. They include a timeline of the crash with documentation showing what was lost and that it was correctly reported at the time.
Another interesting reaction to the news was tweeted by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), who pointed out that IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testified before Congress in March of this year that all of Lerner’s emails were stored in servers and would be provided to Congress once private information contained in them was appropriately redacted.
Interestingly, there’s been no reaction to Lerner’s lost emails yet in the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times, both of whom are usually active, if errant, voices in the debate over further regulation of political speech. Apparently, the IRS’s announcement doesn’t fit the “all the news that’s fit to print” standard.
At CCP, we document the targeting scandal and ongoing investigations in an extensive timeline that includes both revelations from congressional investigators and instances of politicians and activist groups pressuring the IRS to investigate conservative nonprofits. We will continue to cover developments in the scandal, even if the mainstream media seems determined to ignore them. To those of us paying attention, the IRS, like Lucille Ball years ago, has some ‘splaining to do.
