OK, this has officially become open obstruction of justice:
According to the House Ways and Means Committee, the IRS has “lost” two years of emails belonging to former head of tax exempt organizations Lois Lerner. The IRS doesn’t have a record of her emails to outside groups or government agencies from January 2009 through April 2011, conveniently encompassing some of the same time when tea party groups were being targeted for extra scrutiny and possible criminal prosecution. The IRS says the loss of emails is due to a “computer crash” and claims emails from or to Lerner from the White House, Democratic members of Congress, the Treasury Department and Department of Justice cannot be located. They do however have emails belonging to Lerner that she sent to other IRS employees.
Anyone who knows how email works knows that this is complete and utter bravo sierra.
[Saturday afternoon update]
Powerline explains how email works. As I said, this is nothing more than a blatant lie.
[Bumped]
[Update a few minutes later]
“It’s theater. It’s like the sheriff of a county in the deep south cutting loose the six guys everyone saw do the lynching in front of the victims’ families so they know just how powerless they really are.”
[Update a while later]
What was in those “lost” emails? The 2013 IRS IG report has some clues.
[Update a few minutes later]
Things at the Justice Department are “very, very bad.”
I can believe it, considering who’s been running the place for the past five and a half years.
[Update a few more minutes later]
Sharyl Atkisson has some questions for the IRS:
The Committee had requested the Lerner emails as part of its investigation into to the targeting of conservative non-profits by the IRS. The Obama administration has denied any corruption or intentional wrongdoing. Lerner took the Fifth when asked to testify to Congress. The House of Representatives subsequently held her in contempt. The lost materials are said to include any communications that may have occurred between Lerner and outside agencies or groups such as the White House, the Treasury Department, the Department of Justice, the Federal Elections Commission and the offices of Democrats.
House and Ways Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) says that along with providing news of the emails that have been lost, the IRS suggested in the same letter to Congress that it end its investigation.
The late disclosure of the lost emails may be reason to disregard the suggestion.
But remember, not a smidgen of corruption.
Gee and all this time I thought it was required by law that the stuff be backed up.
Ahhh “….required by law….”
Laws are for little people.
Well now we have the Obama equivalent of Nixon’s 18 minute gap.
Except it’s a two-year gap.
“Except it’s a two-year gap.”
Obama has found so many ways to exceed even Nixson’s wildest dreams…………….
Obama has found so many ways to exceed even Nixson’s wildest dreams…………….
Nixon was an innocent choirboy compared to Obama.
Also, he did not display open contempt for the American people and our system of government.
I want to hear the usual suspects defend this. If they have a shred of integrity, they will condemn this in no uncertain terms. If the Federal Data Policy was followed in the most half-assed manner known to man, there were multiple back-ups of all emails.
If I was Congress, I would start offering qualified immunity and cutting deals to get the ones at the heart of this. I would also start issuing contempt of congress citations at the drop of a dime and start putting people in jail till they talk.
” If they have a shred of integrity, they will condemn this in no uncertain terms.”
Lol
“I want to hear the usual suspects defend this. If they have a shred of integrity, they will condemn this in no uncertain terms. ”
So dn-guy should be here any second now to explain why it’s OK.
The silence from dn-guy is deafening.
Apparently dn-guy doesn’t have his updated marching orders yet.
“I want to hear the usual suspects defend this. If they have a shred of integrity, they will condemn this in no uncertain terms. ”
Hold not thy breath.
Even a 2 year “the dog ate my homework” excuse can’t phase the Jim, Gerrib, and dn’s of the world. Even though Jim purports to be an engineer and ought to know about backups and disk recovery……
Even though Gerrib purports to be a Man of the Sea and therefore a practical sort…….
As for dn…nobody expects him to be able to rub 2 synapses together
Let’s also bear in mind that E-mail exists in at least two places; where it’s sent from, and where it’s sent to. So, the other ends of the conversations should have records of it. However, I’m sure they’ll find some excuse to not have it. (another server “crash”?)
Basically, what they are claiming (that they can’t produce the e-mails) is impossible, unless they intentionally (In flagrant violation of the law) didn’t keep records at all. So, no matter where the truth lies, we can say for a fact that felonies have been committed.
Many companies also keep a record of emails on the servers as well, which are backed up. Someone needs to go to jail.
Three places, if you count the NSA keyloggers.
The Administration just laughs at the peasants.
Want our IRS e-mails? No! What are you going to do about it?
Stop the flood of people across the Mexico border in accordance with the law? No! What are you going to do about it?
At some point, something Bad is going to happen. I don’t know what, but it’s horrifically destructive to our system of government for the Executive Branch to willfully ignore the law.
It’s almost like the Left wants to start a second American civil war. I know that leftists have a problem figuring out the relationship between cause and effect (otherwise they wouldn’t be lefties), but surely the career civil servants must realize that the Right has the guns and most of the military veterans.
In the parts of the left that do want another civil war, you can bet they fully intend to utilise the army and law enforcement personnel to do their fighting. A lot of folks don’t believe the army would obey such orders but I think that is a fantasy. If the army is told to guard government buildings and establish checkpoints, and they get shot at by militia while performing those duties, the militia will instantly be the bad guys, no matter what the political situation is.
The army is a tool of whoever is in power, not a force to defend the people. And I say this as a very pro-military guy. I’m just a realist about it.
And Obama has been steadily purging the officer corps of patriots and replacing them with political sycophants, as all dictators do.
There would be a massive rebellion in the .mil if that was tried and a possible Military Coup. Regardless, if only 10% were covertly supporting the rebels, it would render the other 90% combat ineffective in short order.
http://blog.wilsoncombat.com/paul-howe/2nd-amendment-and-the-kool-aid-drinkers-by-paul-howe/
Read that carefully. that guy is retired, Tier 1 JSOC SOFD-D aka Delta.
Let’s be clear what has happened here. In a Friday news dump 400 days ago the IRS admitted targeting conservative groups. That is, using the power of arguably the most powerful government agency against groups opposed to the President to silence them with red tape during an election. The one official who could tie the operation directly to the President has plead the 5th and suddenly there is an implausible two year gap in her emails.
This goes so far beyond an 18 minute gap in a tape – the same gap, incidentally, the put Hilary Rodham on a path to political stardom with the question “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” – and is yet another example of a bald-faced lie from the Administration.
Only this time, they’ve gone too far. The Benghazi video lie was one thing, but the IRS losing data is such an over-the-top whopper that there is no way that anyone in the White House expects anyone to believe it. They are lying to your face and they know that everyone knows they’re lying. They also know that IT expertise is so ubiquitous that they would be called out on the lie immediately.
That’s the action of someone who thinks they can do whatever they want to you and that you can’t do anything about it. In other words, tyrants.
You’ve given me chills. You’ve just described sociopathy.
“That’s the action of someone who thinks they can do whatever they want to you and that you can’t do anything about it. In other words, tyrants.”
It’s a little off-topic with regard to the IRS scandal, but not regarding Government Tyranny:
“The Associated Press (AP) obtained an email from Eligio “Lee” Pena, an assistant patrol agent, that ordered more than 3,000 agents to not speak to reporters about the “humanitarian crisis.” The email allegedly said that reporters are likely to press for details and “may try to disguise themselves” in the process.”
Pena’s email went on to warn agents that they could be disciplined or even charged with a crime if they speak to media, according to the AP. ”
So now the Government is directly limiting speech because it doesn’t want you to see/know the truth. It wants to hide things from you…events and circumstances it created.
Andrew C. McCarthy, of NRO, asks:
“When will this president finally have to answer for the executive-branch lawlessness that is an everyday occurrence on his watch?”
I’m hoping the day after the 2014 election where the GOP takes over the House and Senate……
But I fear, never:
I am unsure the GOP has the guts to do it, even with Congressional Majorities, and
I have zero confidence the MSM will wake up and become aware of their duties.
Meanwhiel the Dear Leader is off to Palm Springs for a golfing vacation and a fund raiser….
This is pretty strange behavior…with the “humanitarian crisis” on the Southern Border (which he created), the Middle East imploding, Russia stirring things up in Latvia and sending tanks to the Ukraine, the IRS magically losing 2 years worth of emails(Dear Leader promised the most transparent…..), oil prices spiking, one would think that the Leader would hang around Washington to LEAD.
Well the Leader woudl do that if he thought we were in a crisis situation.
But if he thinks of all of these events as a Cloward-Piven strategy writ large………..
If the idea all along was to overload the US not only with welfare payments but world events as well…such that it cannot respond to all of them or maybe any of them, effectively……
After all where is His Arrogance the Secretary of State?
Why here:
LONDON — Secretary of State John Kerry said on Friday that sexual violence in conflict zones should be banished “to the dark ages and the history books,” as he joined dozens of ministers and the actress Angelina Jolie to promote efforts to bring perpetrators of such crimes to justice.
Yes! Most vital! Of Supreme Importance! Women are being slaughtered along with their children and menfolk for being of a different branch of Muslim – or for being Christian – in huge swaths throughout Syria and Iraq…being forced into burkas and stoned for adultery, and kept ignorant chattel…..
…and His Arrogance is in London with the Brie and Chardonnay crowd deploring “sexual violence in conflict zones”.
My god…..
I’m not a big fan of the administration, but have some third-hand knowledge of IRS IT and find it quite plausible they didn’t have viable central backups.
If you want to speculate about how Lerner’s PC failed just then, feel free.
Somehow, the idea that the IRS is incompetent at record-keeping provides no comfort.
Email doesn’t just live on the client computer. This is simply a lie.
Ah, for those simple days when Rosemary Woods just had to show off the calisthenics required for Nixon’s 18 minute gap.
This new stuff would require an electronic millipede.
Anybody old enough has seen for themselves how politics has become removed from the people. The shining city on the hill is no more. These problems are easily fixable except for one thing. The people that would have fixed them (regardless of party affiliation) no longer exist.
Welcome to the end times. Government is about to turn on all religions. Business will sit on the sidelines saying “too bad.” People will cheer until they realize they’re next.
I’d like to see a rational explanation, but, it seems odd at first impression
The only rational explanation is that they very much don’t want us to see what is in those emails.
There are two obvious rational explanations:
1. They’re lying.
2. They’re incompetent.
Which would you prefer?
No, no , no, dn-guy, for the barking moonbat character to work, you have to actually stay in character. C’mon, channel your inner Democrat, I’m sure you can come up with OMG LOOKIT THE SQUIRREL!
Here is what he’s supposed to say:
It’s Bush’s fault! He bought the servers and software from Haliburton! It a conspiracy from fostered by basement bloggers in their pyjamas! This whole thing is just a codeword for racism! He has served with honor and distinction! It was because the server admins were incited to smash their keyboards because they were watching heretical YouTube videos!
Why would anyone ever vote for a Chicago machine politician into national office. This all makes Nixon look like a saint (and like a complete piker).
But But …The sequester cut the IRS budget for tape backups!
Can I call it or what?
I’d like to see a rational explanation, but, it seems odd at first impression
Dn-guy, that is the best spin you can do?
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1505
seems like this is the relevant statute, it may not be a violation.
Can you ask what (server-side) email retention policies are at your personal workplace?
I don’t know that you’ve named it beyond ‘DC’, but curious.
Our policy is zero server side retention, individuals are expected to maintain
email on their workstations.
Of course, we haven’t been sued. Server side is more convenient for litigation.
So, if you work for the government, you are operating totally illegally.
Moron.
it’s all moot anyways if they are exempt from that lone section. The employees aren’t exempt from contempt of Congress and conspiracy charges. I am sure there are plethora of sections of Federal Law that could be applied easily.
You can always give a guy QI and they either are in contempt of Congress or guilty of Perjury no matter which way they go.
That was for douchenozzle Rand.
This is about the dumbest policy I have ever heard. That is about the worst way to maintain any kind of system. And what happens when a personal employee’s workstation has a hard drive crash? Is all that work lost?
The only possible way that that would work and still be generally acceptable to any IT person worth the air they are breathing is if you were using some kind of virtualized workstations that were booted off of a SAN device like a NetApp. Or else your home folder is mounted off of a central file server so that storage of email and whatnot is backed up that way.
And it doesn’t stop any kind of litigation discovery. OK, so I just serve a warrant and take all of your workstations. Problem solved.
And anyway it is beside the point.
The whole topic is here is that there is regular email traffic up until date X, and then there is nothing, and then regular email traffic resumes normally at date Y. And it just so happens that between X and Y is the time in question about the Tea Party IRS bullcrap.
So, you can retrieve emails from storage prior to X and after Y, but between those dates you couldn’t retrieve the emails from the same storage?
The agency charged with processing all income taxes in the country and is able to bring up old tax forms to pursue tax avoidance charges suddenly becomes incompetent to store emails?
And your argument is literally, “it might not have been illegal because I can’t find a proper statute”?
Way to miss the entire point, which is using the IRS as a political weapon.
It’s a policy that has accreted from the fact our ISP handles
the domain and mail service.
As for work station crashes, well, everyone has a backup
running to a local disk, so, it would require some sort of
malware, to really scoriate a workstation.
and, the policy wasnt meant to block discovery, the policy was just
the cheap way to do things. We didn’t want to invest in a lot
of IT support.
As for discovery, if you don’t go around inducing litigation, you won’t get sued
very often.
I will solve your cheap IT needs:
https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/overview/DS1813+
I have one of these at my house with 8 4TB drives in RAID 6 (so 24TB usable space). I can lose two hard drives and still have my files intact. If a hard drive fails, I go buy a new one, put it in, and otherwise never know anything happened. And for my family pictures, the pictures share is also backed up to an external USB drive in case the unit itself dies.
It comes with a backup client you can install on each computer in your office to back up to it.
Cost me about $2700 in total for the unit, the hard drives, and a small UPS for it.
Yes, it may be overkill for a personal use case but it allows me to pretty much never have to worry about storage again, and I can reinstall my machines and restore things with very little trouble. I have a desktop, a laptop, a cell phone, and a tablet that all back up to this unit.
I was responding to your point that no server helps stop litigation. The point I am making is, it doesn’t stop anything on the government side and only makes your life harder because you have X independent computers with backup effort completely at the whim of the individual employees.
Forgot to add, the unit can also push to Amazon Glacier so your files are in an external location in case your building burns down or you lose your local storage for any other reason.
I’ll even do you one more favor and list the specific hardware I use:
1 x DS1813+
8 x 4TB HGST Deskstar NAS hard drives (0S03664)
1 x CyberPower CP600LCD
All are listed as compatible with the DS1813+ and you now have an IT policy infinitely better than the one you have now.
DN-Guy, you are a technological twit and are about as versed in e-mail systems archiving as the dullard journalism majors in the “press” (deliberate use of air quotes and lower case). Clearly you have never been involved in the IT field, if you have I suggest that you go back to where you received your training and ask for a refund.
I’ll keep it simple and quote the “font of all internet knowledge”, e.g. Wikipedia:
And how many of these laws apply to the US Government?
I hate to break it to you, but the USG routinely exempts itself from
most laws.
And dn-guy again misses the point that apparently they can get emails before X and after Y, but not between X and Y, and between X and Y is the time in question.
Ah no. Corporate email is not saved at the workstation level. Email is a server side function, not a client side one. You’d better check with your IT people before making claims like that.
Congratulations to Edward Wright for giving you the proper moniker of Deny Guy.
From the link:
Whoever, with intent to avoid, evade, prevent, or obstruct compliance, in whole or in part, with any civil investigative demand duly and properly made under the Antitrust Civil Process Act, willfully withholds, misrepresents, removes from any place, conceals, covers up, destroys, mutilates, alters, or by other means falsifies any documentary material, answers to written interrogatories, or oral testimony, which is the subject of such demand; or attempts to do so or solicits another to do so;
5 years isn’t enough in this case.
Note the phrase “Antitrust Civil Process Act”… Unless the ACP applies to this, it’s not
operative law.
What I thought the operative law is:”
Whoever corruptly, or by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or communication influences, obstructs, or impedes or endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede the due and proper administration of the law under which any pending proceeding is being had before any department or agency of the United States, or the due and proper exercise of the power of inquiry under which any inquiry or investigation is being had by either House, or any committee of either House or any joint committee of the Congress—
The problem is the word corruptly. If the IRS management just simply said “F&*( those A^&()es”
and threw out the tapes, well, that’s not by force or threat and may not be corrupt.
To look at corruptly, you should probably read US v Aguilar 515 U.S. 593 1995, it’s fairly recent so it’s probably good law.
The corruption is a second statement, dummy. The first statement says if you do it. The second statement says someone else did it, but you coerced them to do it. Either crime is punishable with fine and potential jail time. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you ought to stop doing it.
Someone is going to jail.
I’d suggest you read the “Antitrust Civil Process Act” http://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/28/49.3
Unless DoJ asks for the records, it’s not binding.
I’m not aware of the DoJ having agencies or committees within the House. If your point is the DoJ can only prosecute, you may be correct, but I’ll be more than happy to see Holder jump the shark and deal with the consequences. Obstruction of Justice is easy for people to understand. No one is buying the notion the IRS accidentally lost the email lawfully requested by Congress over a year ago. The same emails the Commissioner of the IRS said were being archived and would be made available. As Rand says this “phony scandal” has become a rather obvious crime. Hell, its even easier today to suggest conspiracy to commit crime. We are now well past the notion of this being a few corrupt employees working under Lerner.
I also suggest Deny Guy realize that Congress is not the only one pushing a lawsuit against Lerner and the IRS. IRS Commissioner has already made claims that invalidate all of Deny Guy’s IT claims.
You really are a piece of work.
That was towards DN.
“Keep moving, people! Nothing to see here!”–Baghdad Jim
Pretty funny:
https://twitter.com/VodkaPundit/status/477606168584400899/photo/1
When those two men were terrorizing greater D.C. by shooting people at random, it turned out the shooter hid inside the trunk of a sedan and used what would be the trunk lock as a gun aperture. Our soldiers in Iraq encountered this as S.O.P. by the insurgents and were on the lookout for this tactic, but at the time it was completely unexpected to law enforcement and everyone else.
My take was that every deer poacher in Northern Michigan was thinking, “Gee, why didn’t I think of that?” (shooting from a concealed position from the trunk of a car)
I betcha every person brought to justice by an e-mail trail is thinking, “Gee, why didn’t I think of that?”
So DN’s response is basically that while it might have been unethical as hell and incredibly suspicious, it wasn’t technically illegal for the US government to destroy evidence in an ongoing congressional investigation. Because if the emails are really gone, they have to be gone from every server they were sent to. That requires effort and deliberateness.
Don’t try to try frighten us with your sorceror’s ways, Lord Vader. Your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you conjure up the missing e-mails. Or given you clairvoyance enough to find the TEA Party’s hidden mailing lis– (face contorts, gasping)
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
The law is the law.
Now maybe there is some other element you could apply.
“Contempt of Congress”, “Record destruction”, etc,
but when I looked through the obstruction statute it didn’t read as applicable.
now, the congress could always vote a bill of impeachment or issue an arrest warrant
and put Obama in chains in the capital gaol.
I’m pretty sure destroying evidence in an investigation is illegal, but hey your side one so it doesn’t matter.
“The law is the law.”
And the highest law of the USA is the Constitution. All other laws derive their legitimacy from the Constitution, and if a law is in violation of the Constitution then that law is invalid and enforcement of it is a fraudulent use of government power. So, when the first amendment says that Congress shall make NO law abridging the freedom of speech, and yet Congress goes ahead and makes that law anyway, then that law is invalid and enforcement of it by the IRS is a violation of the oath to protect and defend the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic. This is basic civics, and so very obvious.
When Congress passes a blatantly unconstitutional statue like McCain-Feingold, it is the obligation of IRS agents to refuse to enforce this unconstitutional abridgement of the freedom of speech.
That they not only ignored their obligation to refuse to enforce an anti-constitutional statute, but applied it selectively to members of only one political party, and then lied about it to Congress, and then tried to cover their tracks by destroying evidence, all of this must make it very difficult for you to maintain the deny-guy character. I mean, you can say something banal like “the law is the law”, sure, but you’re making it too easy.
C’mon,let’s see if we can come up with something better. Remember, you’re the Stephen Colbert of the Left. OK, Colbert is on the Left pretending to be an over the top version of what the Left thinks the Right is. Which makes you the Colbert of the Right, sorta.
Which means that you need something more like this:
“The Lerner ’emails’, as the Koch brothers like to call such things, aren’t actually missing-missing. They’re still there, it’s just that some of the 0s have changed to 1s and some of the 1s are now zeros. Also, there is the occasional 2, which makes the encryption really really complex. It could take the NSA guys another 18 months to decode them all. If only the Issa witch hunt (most likely instigated by Karl Rove – follow the money straight to Halliburton) hadn’t frightened poor Lois Lerner with their racist dog whistles, she wouldn’t have been so terrified of Rethuglicans that she encrypted all her files and then, in her terror, forgotten the password. Because science. #yesallwomenincludingloislerner”
See? That makes no sense at all, and is therefore irrefutable. You’re usually better at this. Perhaps you’re ill? Consider the above paragraph a freebie; if I was to write your scripts for you I doubt you could afford my rates.
Ed, he’s just going to say that “no controlling legal authority” had ruled M-F unconstitutional, and if Congress passed it and BUUUUUSSHH signed it, those dedicated civil servants in the IRS had to presume it passed muster.
“I was just following orders.”
We don’t need some “other element”, missing 2 years of data is just fine as it is. As you say, the Law is the Law.
I sure would have enjoyed watching you scour the interwebs to look for a loophole.
“The law is the law.”
Unless it comes to immigration, Obamacare, recess appointments, ect ect ect.
You can’t say, “the law is the law”, when you don’t actually believe in following the law.
They should see if all of Lerner’s Richard Windsor type accounts have also been “lost”.
IRS rules for using email:
http://www.irs.gov/irm/part1/irm_01-010-003.html
NB. section 1.10.3.2.3.5: “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. Therefore, print and file email and its attachments if they are either permanent records or if they relate to a specific case.”
Now, section 1.10.3.2.3 is dated 07-08-2011, So I don’t know how much the text of that section differed from whatever procedures were in place prior to July of 2011. Can anyone find an earlier version of the IRS standard regarding use of email, preferably covering the time period 2009-2011?
PowerLine Saturday listed relevant portions of the IRS manual on Managing Electronic Records and posted several of the. There was one section on transferring electronic records to magnetic tape. In it was listed half inch reel to reel and 3490 carts. These are normally used in mainframe environments, though they are somewhat old. Mainframes don’t eat data, and in order to lose data, backups or anything else requires active intervention. There are also onsite and offsite backups retained. Finally, one of the work arounds used by this regime against FOIA requests is to use civilian / non-governmental e-mail services. Those guys retain everything as does the NSA which has been slurping e-mail traffic for the last half decade. The e-mails aren’t gone. They must be incredibly damning for this regime to try something this stupid. Cheers –