It turns out that they aren’t really.
You don’t say.
They just didn’t want to be bothered with retrieving them from backup.
Right.
[Wednesday-morning update]
George Will: The IRS is off the rails and totally corrupted.
I wonder how many other agencies are?
Seriously, when are people going to start getting prosecuted for all of this?
Not so long as Eric Holder is Attorney General.
+2
Eric Holder does not have a monopoly on law enforcement. The judge who’s requesting this information from the IRS, Emmett Sullivan, could appoint a special prosecutor, as he did to investigate the DOJ prosecution of Ted Stevens. Or another judge could.
He just might do that since:
“The IRS destroyed Lerner’s Blackberry AFTER it knew her computer had crashed and after a Congressional inquiry was well underway. As an IRS official declared under the penalty of perjury, the destroyed Blackberry would contain the same emails (both sent and received) as Lois Lerner’s hard drive.”
Or voxsplained: “It is just a misunderstanding, and IRS IT folks are prone to commit perjury to protect Congress”.
This much obstruction of justice suggests the real crime is probably worse than we expect.
Prosecuted for what? A misunderstanding?
Would you agree that if all of this is a simple misunderstanding then the IRS needs to produce the documentation as required, as soon as possible?
Nixon would tell you [obstruction of justice] but you’re just being disingenuous, aren’t you Jim?
This is a crime, btw, that often leads to long federal prison sentences… back when rule of law existed.
“Prosecuted for what? A misunderstanding?”
So when an Obama-noid says something you swallow it lock stock and barrel……..totally acceptable OF COURSE it’s true……no skepticism whatsoever
But when a Judicial Watch person says something….ooooh nooo there’s ulterior motives here…..fishing expedition! just causing trouble!!!!!!!
The Obamanoids have much more reason to lie and dissemble than JW.
You claim and reclaim this is just a partisan witch hunt…
Like Obama and his crowd, you exhibit the very attribute (partisanship) which you accuse of others.
What the DOJ spokesperson said makes sense. What Tom Fitton said doesn’t. I predict that within a month there will be no more talk of this mystery backup system that saves all federal government emails, forever. It’s a silly claim, perfect for getting right-wing blogs and their gullible readers fired up for a news cycle.
It’s not a silly claim. It’s standard operating procedure with email and has been for decades. Can’t baffle us with bullshit, fella.
“A Department of Justice attorney told a Judicial Watch attorney on Friday that it turns out the federal government backs up all computer records in case something terrible happens in Washington,” Fitton said.
Which is a very good reason to back stuff up – regardless of all the Lerner/IRS/Administration lying.
So, if we believe them (ha!), by their own admission, they committed multiple counts of felony perjury because it’s such a trouble to restore a backup?
Gee, I wonder how the IRS would take it if I just make stuff up on my tax return and lie about it, because it was just too much dang trouble to find my actual records?
Ya, it would be one thing to say the emails exist but are an extraordinary pain in the butt to retrieve and another thing to say they have all been destroyed and can’t be recovered.
“One of them, Stephen Manning, said there is “no record of any attempt by any IRS IT employee to recover data from any Blackberry device assigned to Lois Lerner in response to the congressional investigations or this litigation.””
Say what? Next they will say they never bothered to check her lap top or the email server.
My guess; we’ll find out that the hard drive never actually failed at all.
My take: rather obviously, they didn’t commit multiple counts of felony perjury, defying court orders, lying to congress, etc, just to save some IT techs some bother. They did it because, to them, hiding whatever they are hiding was worth the risk.
And that means it’s something big.
Two IRS IT techs have sworn under oath that the hard drive had failed. Why would they commit perjury?
“Why would they commit perjury?”
Why does anyone commit perjury?
You seem to have constant and serious trouble with the concept that you need to have an investigation before you can state conclusions.
Why do you ask for conclusions before the investigation (in this case of the tech’s previous testimony) is completed?
It’s as if you wish to diminish the issue by saying that no one can explain the new data….yet the new data hasn’t been investigated, digested and explored.
Your argument proves too much: it justifies never-ending investigation. The IRS told Congress that Lerner had a hard disk crash, and so they couldn’t produce some emails she’d sent. Congress and a judge ordered more investigation, so the IRS IT techs who worked on the hard drive gave sworn testimony. Now you’re saying we need to investigate their testimony, in case they are committing perjury. And if what you find from that investigation does not satisfy you, no doubt you’ll call for it to be investigated further.
At some point you have to say that enough is enough, and let the results of your investigation stand. These techs have no motive to commit perjury on behalf of someone in a completely different part of the IRS. There is no reason to believe that the contemporaneous emails about the hard drive failure were forged or tampered with. Lerner had a hard drive crash, and the IRS IT techs couldn’t recover the data on the hard drive. Stuff happens. Not everything is a conspiracy.
At some point you have to say that enough is enough, and let the results of your investigation stand.
What results of what investigation? When the IRS produces the requested documents, that’s when the investigation begins.
“At some point you have to say that enough is enough, and let the results of your investigation stand. ”
Results? There haven’t been any results:
Since the evidence necessary to come to a conclusion DID exist…then DIDN’T exist…and now EXISTS….and it has not been presented, and since the story about WHY it hasn’t been presented has been changed numerous times……
it’s reasonable to conclude there is pertinent information that is being hidden.
We need to find out if that’s true.
The law as broken and people’s rights were violated – this has been addmitted by the IRS. Until we know who is invoved and why, there’s no reason to close the investigation.
Remember:
The IRS first denied it happened…..and
Obama said there isn’t a smidgen of corruption…..
Then the IRS agreed that the law was violated and these people’s rights were violated….
Then the IRS blamed rogue agents in Cleveland
There is plenty to investigate. Stonewalling, slow walking and lying by the Feds only adds fuel to the fire.
“And if what you find from that investigation does not satisfy you, no doubt you’ll call for it to be investigated further.”
If Lerner provides proof (not just evidence) that she knew about the violation the IRS has admitted to and immediately called a halt to it and fired the relevant personnel, then I would say her chapter in this story is closed.
But..she didn’t do any of that…..did she?
“Lerner had a hard drive crash, and the IRS IT techs couldn’t recover the data on the hard drive.”
When Dana Andrews was at Boeing, he told me that the IT people gave them a demonstration of hard drive security. Dana and company wrote a short Word document whose contents were known only to them, saved it on a hard drive, then proceeded to destroy the drive. They removed the platter, broke it with a hammer, and ran a magnet over the fragments. The IT people took it away, and came back a little while later with the Word document. That the IRS’s IT people were “unable” to retrieve e-mail from her drive is simply not credible.
Because improperly destroying government property, particularly if doing so in support of a coverup is a worse crime in their mind than perjury.
Why would they commit perjury? That is simply shouting SQUIRREL!!
I think a better question is why hasn’t the IRS produced the documentation they were required to produce? Obviously everyone has been led to believe that the documentation could not be produced due to hard drive failures. I think the order to produce the documentation was not specific to a particular piece of hardware such as the hard drive in Ms. Lerner’s current desktop computer, it was “give us everything you have” regardless of the current location or the effort necessary to comply.
Pop quiz, smart guy: How many weeks does it take to sanitize emails, huh?
Good god. How dumb is the American public? How passive is the American public?
Where’s our resident trolls to voxsplain why this is all perfectly fine?
The claim is that “A Department of Justice attorney told a Judicial Watch attorney on Friday it turns out the federal government backs up all computer records in case something terrible happens in Washington”. My first reaction is to be intrigued, and curious. Does that include files stored on desktop computers like Lerner’s? How is recovery (e.g. after “something terrible happens in Washington”) supposed to work? Why do DOJ lawyers seem to know more about this than IRS IT staff?
I think it’d be great if the federal government had complete archives of everything, but this is the first suggestion that they might, and it’s a second-hand report from an unnamed source, relayed by Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, someone with an interest in pushing a cover-up narrative. Another unnamed administration official is describing the report as a simple misunderstanding on Fitton’s part, telling Fox News “There was no new back-up system described last week to Judicial Watch. Government lawyers who spoke to Judicial Watch simply referred to the same email retention policy that Commissioner (John) Koskinen had described in his Congressional testimony.”
The “email retention policy” that Koskinen described fits the other aspects of this report: it’s designed for disaster recovery, and it would be onerous to search months of backups for an individual’s deleted emails. But it doesn’t include emails stored on desktops like Lerner’s, and tapes were being recycled after six months, so even if they’d taken the trouble to go through all 180 or so backups back in 2011 they wouldn’t have recovered email for the entire two year period in question. And of course those tapes were recycled years ago, so even an onerous recovery isn’t possible today.
In summary: without more information to corroborate Fitton’s claim, this sounds like another case of an interested party hyping a non-revelation as something of great political significance (like the time David Camp got worked up over the fact that Lerner’s hard disk was “scratched”). And why not? It gives Fitton another chance to go on TV and say that the IRS is lying, and it isn’t as if anyone is going to call him on it. A year or two from now, when the emails still haven’t been recovered, some people will vaguely remember this story and wonder why the “found” emails never came out; it will be just one more reason to believe that there’s a conspiracy afoot.
“In summary: without more information to corroborate Fitton’s claim, this sounds like another case of an interested party hyping a non-revelation ..”
Judicial Watch reports:
“The IRS filing in federal Judge Emmet Sullivan’s court reveals shocking new information.”
Why don’t you go fetch the IRS filing and post it for us..proving your assertion that the IRS did NOT say what JW says they said.
Why don’t you go fetch the IRS filing and post it for us..
The IRS filing is here. It does not say anything about a backup system from which all of Lerner’s emails can be recovered. But then Judicial Watch attributed the “secret backup system” story to a DOJ lawyer, not the IRS filing.
So tell us Jim – what is the truth:
1) Did the IRS violate the law and fail to back up the emails?
or
2) Did they back up the emails and lie to us about failing to back up the emails?
The IRS failed to back up all emails. I don’t think that failing to back up all emails violates the law.
“The IRS failed to back up all emails. I don’t think that failing to back up all emails violates the law.”
Failing to back up all the emails pertinent to the business of the agency *IS* a violation of the law. You’ve been shown the relevant statute/act numerous times.
Failing to back up a personal email about whether Burger King is better than MacDonalds would not violate the law.
And you know that very well, and are dissembling.
I’m not a lawyer. The Official Records Act does seem to make it illegal to not preserve copies of emails about agency business. But email has been around a while now, and I don’t think any federal agency has a policy of archiving every email; they all leave it up to individual employee discretion. People being people, no employee is going to do a perfect job of manually archiving every business-related email. So one way to look at this is to conclude that there have been hundreds of thousands of violations of the law, across every agency, for decades, under administrations of both parties. If that’s the case, it’s the least interesting aspect of the Lois Lerner controversy. Prosecuting her for not printing out emails would be like prosecuting her for jaywalking.
If Congress wants every email archived, it should pass a law that requires the automatic archiving of all emails. Leaving it up to employee discretion, tolerating widespread non-compliance, and then only prosecuting in politically-charged cases, would be abusive.
“If Congress wants every email archived, it should pass a law that requires the automatic archiving of all emails. ”
Unecessary and intrusive – spoken like a person hungering for more State Power.
The law is enough. Hold backups in perpetuity. They can’t even follow that.
“Leaving it up to employee discretion, tolerating widespread non-compliance, and then only prosecuting in politically-charged cases, would be abusive.”
Leaving it up to employee discretion as to *how* is fine.
Tolerating non-compliance is not.
But that does *NOT* absolve the IRs from breaking the law.
You don’t get stopped every time a cop sees you speeding. But sometimes you do get stopped. Does that mean you think you should never be stopped nor convicted?
“Prosecuting her for not printing out emails would be like prosecuting her for jaywalking.”
Prosecuting her for not complying with the law is totally correct ESPECIALLY when the law was flouted to violate a citizen’s rights.
Man you will give these people unbelievable leeway.
Man you will give these people unbelievable leeway.
I don’t recall hearing you call for the prosecution of Bush administration officials for not keeping copies of all emails related to agency business. So leeway is okay, but only for some?
“I don’t recall hearing you call for the prosecution of Bush administration officials for not keeping copies of all emails related to agency business. So leeway is okay, but only for some?”
No – unlike you I’m not a raging hypocrite. Had I KNOWN about it, I would have at least had them fired. Had I known there were specific statutes (and I didn’t until the Lerner case) telling them that they MUST provide backups I would have had then prosecuted and thrown in the slammer for as man years as the law allows.
Unlike you I don’t care which party the transgressor belongs to,
Had I known there were specific statutes (and I didn’t until the Lerner case) telling them that they MUST provide backups I would have had then prosecuted and thrown in the slammer for as man years as the law allows.
Why not do so now? Isn’t the statute of limitations usually 7 years? I look forward to you spending as much time calling for prosecution of Bush officials as you do of Lois Lerner.
Which Bush officials have been withholding subpoenaed documents and pleading the Fifth to stonewall an ongoing criminal investigation?
“The IRS failed to back up all emails. I don’t think that failing to back up all emails violates the law.”
1) It violates the Federal Records Act – a law. This seems to be one of many facts you have a hard time grasping.
2) Violation of the law in #1 covers up the admitted violation of the rights of US citizens. The endless lies they’ve told us makes ever right-thinking person deeply suspicious about their alleged failure to back up emails.
3) They destroyed the black berry after the investigation began
4) They violated the rights of US citizens and had effect on the outcome of an election.
5) They have proven themselves not to be trustworthy.
6) No one has been punished for the admitted violation of US citizens’ rights.
That just for starters.
“without more information to corroborate Fitton’s claim, …”
So now Fitton is lying? Notice in the excerpt form the article below, that the Justice dept doesn’t say they don’t exist..they corroborate Fitton’s statement.
They simply say it takes a lot of work to get to them.
You lose.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said Justice Department lawyers informed him that the federal government keeps a back-up copy of every email and record in the event of a government-wide catastrophe.
The back-up system includes the IRS emails, too.
“So, the emails may inconvenient to access, but they are not gone with the [broken] hard drive,” Judicial Watch spokeswoman Jill Farrell told the Washington Examiner.
Judicial Watch is now seeking the release of the emails, which Justice Department lawyers say would be hard to find because of the significant size of the backup system.
the Justice dept doesn’t say they don’t exist..they corroborate Fitton’s statement.
Justice said that they’re looking at the possibility that some — not all — emails might be recoverable from the ends of recycled backup tapes. If I backup 4 GB of data to a tape in 2011, and then recycle the tape and backup 3.9GB of data to it in 2012, there will still be 0.1GB of 2011 data at the end of the tape. And maybe that data includes an email to or from Lois Lerner.
This approach may find some emails, but it’s a long shot. Backup sets tend to get bigger, not smaller, over time. The tapes were recycled multiple times, which reduces the odds of old data surviving. You certainly wouldn’t in your wildest dreams expect to recover every Lerner email from 2009-2011, which is what Fitton claimed was possible.
“…….and it’s a second-hand report from an unnamed source, relayed by Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, someone with an interest in pushing a cover-up narrative. Another unnamed administration official is describing the report as a simple misunderstanding on Fitton’s part…”
I see….so Fitton’s unnamed source is a unicorn and is to be dismissed. but the unnamed administration official’s statement is taken by you to be the truth.
Fitton’s report requires corroboration befor eyou consider it
The unnamed admin official’s report does not…
Your hypocrisy is astonishing…….
Do you really believe Fitton, that there is a system that backs up all federal emails, forever, and from which all of Lerner’s emails can be restored?
I will bet you a SpaceX ball cap that Fitton is wrong, that no such system will be revealed in the next year.
“Do you really believe Fitton, that there is a system that backs up all federal emails, forever, and from which all of Lerner’s emails can be restored? ”
I believe that Fitton’s statement needs to be followed up. I believe that because
1) He has not proven himself to be a liar continuously and
2) the government has, and
3) we are getting these tidbits from the government only after a judge hammers them
Remember:
There was no corruption, says the IRS
Not a smidgen says Obama
Oh well ok so yeah there was corruption and it was bad but it was limited to some rogue agents in Cleveland…
Weeeeeelllll ok so it wasn’t just rogue agents in Cleveland.
And oh by the way 20 – not one or two but 20 – people under investigation all had hard drive failures ald said drives containing the emails from the time period in question.
And we didn’t follow the backup procedures required by law.
Credulity, Jim. Credulity, past performance, reputation.
Remember:
There was no corruption, says the IRS
Not a smidgen says Obama
Oh well ok so yeah there was corruption and it was bad but it was limited to some rogue agents in Cleveland…
Weeeeeelllll ok so it wasn’t just rogue agents in Cleveland.
Your timeline and geography are all wrong. It was:
The IRS IG says the Cincinnati office was using inappropriate, politically-biased keywords
Obama says it’s unacceptable and should be investigated
Some time later Obama claims there isn’t a smidgen of corruption
And oh by the way 20 – not one or two but 20 – people under investigation all had hard drive failures ald said drives containing the emails from the time period in question.
That’s not true either. To date the IRS hasn’t identified anyone but Lois Lerner who has lost emails from the time period in question. In the case of Nicole Flax they specifically testified that while she suffered a hard disk crash on her travel computer, they don’t know of any emails being lost.
I believe that Fitton’s statement needs to be followed up.
That is not much of a vote of confidence. And it’s already been followed up: the administration has explained what he was told, and how he misunderstood it.
“Your timeline and geography are all wrong. It was:”
I didnt post that as a timeline but as a rather abbreviated list of the lies we’ve gotten from this administration alone.
“That is not much of a vote of confidence.”
It’s an infinity of confidence as compared to the confidence I have that the government is telling the truth and working hard to get to the bottom of its admitted corruption and violation of the law.
“Where’s our resident trolls to voxsplain why this is all perfectly fine?”
I find your lack of faith . . . disturbing . . .
Whaddaya mean, Paul? I knew Jimbo would be out here to make up a story about how nothing Democrats do is wrong, and he didn’t fail to disappoint.
If it’s that onerous to retrieve backups under normal circumstances, imagine how hard it would be in a national emergency, when government is operating out of tents.
In an emergency you’d just restore a server to its state as of the most recent backup. To thoroughly respond to an FOIA request for all backed up emails you would have to restore a server to every state possible. So, for example, if you kept six months of nightly backups, you’d have to restore the server to the state it was at the time of each of those 180 or so backups, to be sure you got emails that were sent one day and deleted the next.
So yes, retrieving all emails from a large set of backup tapes is more onerous than restoring a server to operation after a disaster.
What is your assumption underlying this? that the backups are incremental or total?
How did you arrive at 180 days? You made an assumption as to the number of total backups.
It doesn’t matter whether they’re incremental or total, to retrieve every backed up email you’d have to restore to every backed up state.
I’m assuming that the backups were nightly, since that’s a typical schedule. Six months of nightly backups = about 180 backups. If they were only backing up weekly there’d only be about 26 backups in six months; if they were backing up multiple times a day there’d be more than 180.
“It doesn’t matter whether they’re incremental or total, to retrieve every backed up email you’d have to restore to every backed up state.”
You demonstrate profound ignorance of how backup and restoration works. No surprise.
Liar. I can go into my Yahoo account and there they are, every damn one of the emails I’ve sent or received, including spam, for the last 15 years. It doesn’t matter what computer I access those emails from, anywhere in the world. Same goes for my Google mail account and my other email accounts. It not only isn’t difficult, it is trivial.
Liar. I can go into my Yahoo account and there they are, every damn one of the emails I’ve sent or received, including spam, for the last 15 years.
The IRS does not use Yahoo! or Google or any other cloud-based system for email. They run their own Microsoft Exchange servers, and for years — going back to the Bush administration at least — they have not had enough storage to keep all employee emails. The secret backup system of all federal emails is a figment of Tom Fitton’s imagination.
“The IRS does not use Yahoo! or Google or any other cloud-based system for email. ”
You really work very hard to miss the point.
“going back to the Bush administration at least ”
Ahh yes, Bush.
Bush is responsible for Obama’s IRS deliberate persecution of political dissidents? Obama can’t be blamed but there is nothing that can’t be blamed on Bush?
Obama is a grown man, the President of the United States of America, the Leader of the Free World, the Most Powerful Man in the World, ect ect. When will you stop treating him like a victim of circumstance, like a child. who doesn’t control his own actions or those of his administration?
Don’t try to frighten us with your sorcerous ways, Lois Lerner. Your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you conjure up the missing e-mail tapes, or given you clairvoyance enough to find the TEA Party’s hidden mailing list…
This is just ripe for yet another Downfall subtitling. Steiner —
Does that include files stored on desktop computers like Lerner’s?
No. Emails are stored on servers which every IT department (even if not criminally liable like the IRS) regularly back up.
…you would have to restore a server to every state possible.
Don’t you hate when what you’re drinking comes flying out your nose? Thanks for letting my mind drift along various SF scenarios…
Good backup software allows two things… full and incremental backup. The only thing you need is a date from which recovery is a simple process.
The only thing you need is a date from which recovery is a simple process.
That gets you the state of the server on that date. That’s fine for recovering from a disaster: you restore to the state of the server as of the most recent backup. But what you want is every recoverable email.
To put it in more concrete terms, let’s say we have six months of daily backups spanning January 1 to June 30. We can restore the server to its state on January 1, and recover any emails that were on the server then. We can restore the server to its state on June 30, and get the emails that were on the server then. But if an email was sent on, say, March 1, and deleted from the server on March 2, it won’t be on the January 1 backup or the June 30 backup — to get it we would have to restore the server state as of the evening of March 1. To get a message sent on March 2 and deleted on March 3 we’d have to restore the server state as of the evening of March 2. And so on. To get every similarly short-lived message that might have been sent between January 1 and June 30 we would have to restore the server to its state as of every one of those 180 or so daily backups.
That’s certainly possible, but it’s tedious (system restores may take hours) and requires access to one or more spare servers, so it isn’t surprising that you wouldn’t go through that kind of trouble for every employee who suffers a hard disk crash, unless the emails in question were under subpoena. And in 2011, Lerner’s emails weren’t.
The sort of recovery being contemplated today is different: they’re talking about scanning the ends of backup tapes that once held backups of the IRS email server state in 2011 but have since been overwritten with newer information. That isn’t as simple as doing a whole bunch of restores; it’s more like looking for bags of garbage that might have fallen off an incinerator conveyor, and then — if you find any — hoping that the documents you’re looking for just happen to be in those handful of bags.
That just isn’t how the mail servers I’ve set up work.
Yes, you can do a full server restore – and that restores the mail server to the state it was at at that moment.
But the mail server (at least, the ones I used in a galaxy far away) does its own internal archiving of email. You do not want to be required to do a full server restore because Joe deleted his Aunt Minny’s biscuit recipe. Do. Not. The action ‘deleted by Joe’ means nothing more to the system than a flag ‘do not show to user’.
You have the mail server set at something like ‘retain 6 mo’ or ‘never delete’. And the administrator has a full log of receipts for the full period.
If it doesn’t work that way under MS, or whatever friend-of-my-brother-scam system they’re using, they’re doing it wrong.
If it doesn’t work that way under MS
It works that way with Exchange precisely so business can comply with government regulations on data retention. Jim is used to his LIV friends in the Democratic Party that will believe his BS.
You have the mail server set at something like ‘retain 6 mo’ or ‘never delete’.
We don’t know how long the IRS kept deleted mail on the server, but they’ve testified that they did not have the storage to hold all their users active mail, which suggests that they weren’t keeping it long. But you’re right: if they were retaining deleted messages for six months then only two restores would be necessary to retrieve every message from a six-month period. If the retention period was shorter, you’d have to do more restores.
This is somewhat besides the point because it turns out that the “onerous” recovery procedure in question is attempting to recover files from the ends of recycled backup tapes, a totally different problem.
“We don’t know how long the IRS kept deleted mail on the server, but they’ve testified that they did not have the storage to hold all their users active mail”
If the IRS purged its email server on a regular basis, everyone would know because according to the IRS, every worker has to back up their own emails and would be required to do so before a server purge. Where are the workplace accounts of email server purges? That would be pretty annoying and you know people would be complaining about it.
This is all so much BS. Where are other IRS worker’s accounts of having to back up their emails to their hard drives?
Notice Jim’s slight of hand?
they’ve testified that they did not have the storage to hold all their users active mail
We’re talking about backups. Archives. Backup media expands easily to the need, unlike active storage which only has to be large enough for active data. Which backup REDUCES THE NEED for larger capacity.
So yes, retrieving all emails from a large set of backup tapes is more onerous than restoring a server to operation after a disaster.
And yet, the United States government requires every business in the United States to have that capability.
If it’s “too onerous” for the United States government, why is it mandatory for private corporations? How does this government mandate cost the economy? How many extra deaths will occur because the money spent on meeting this requirement wasn’t available for other things, like health care, medical research, and gym memberships?
Bet you don’t answer those questions. 🙂
Another question, Jim: What would happen to a private citizen who told the government it was “too onerous” to retrieve records he was legally required to retain? And why do you think government employees should get off more lightly.
Okay, that was two questions.
And yet, the United States government requires every business in the United States to have that capability.
No, the US government does not require that every business in the US be able to produce every email ever sent or received by every employee.
What would happen to a private citizen who told the government it was “too onerous” to retrieve records he was legally required to retain?
Any claimed deduction, for example, that was not supported by records would be disregarded.
And why do you think government employees should get off more lightly.
The situations aren’t analogous; it’s the investigators who are seeking information to prove allegations against Lerner, not Lerner failing to produce information to prove her claims.
Well, then don’t choose situations which aren’t analogous. Edward didn’t ask about tax deductions, you volunteered that as an example, possibly because you’re a clown.
Now if, say, the DoJ were investigating, oh, I dunno, ignition switch failures at a car company, and the car company used the IRS’ risible “the dog ate our hard drives” excuse to fail to produce any e-mails, do you think the car company should properly get the “oh, that’s just like jay-walking” treatment?
“No, the US government does not require that every business in the US be able to produce every email ever sent or received by every employee.”
No, they don’t but the IRS does require that many different kinds of financial records be kept for various time periods. Failure to do so comes with steep punishments that could put a business under.
The IRS is, however, required to keep different kinds of its own records, like emails and other records of official business. They did not do so and they have lied to congress, the public, and the courts about the records they were supposed to keep. What is the penalty for the IRS?
” in case something terrible happens in Washington,” Fitton said.
Kinda hard to imagine what could happen that wouldn’t be an improvement. You can say the same for Canberra.
This may mean that the pressure put on those bastards by the court judge to explain why they weren’t kept got to them. It may mean that the pain they expect to suffer to admit they lied about losing the emails is less than the expected pain of losing them…or being found out (without them admitting) that they lied.
Someone should go after Koskinen el al very very hard to ask them why they said they were destroyed.
“Onerous” does not mean “impossible” so the judge should lean on the Feds hard to supply the emails.
And then there’s the blackberry:
The IRS filing in federal Judge Emmet Sullivan’s court reveals shocking new information. The IRS destroyed Lerner’s Blackberry AFTER it knew her computer had crashed and after a Congressional inquiry was well underway. As an IRS official declared under the penalty of perjury, the destroyed Blackberry would have contained the same emails (both sent and received) as Lois Lerner’s hard drive. …
With incredible disregard for the law and the Congressional inquiry, the IRS admits that this Blackberry “was removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012.” This is a year after her hard drive “crash” and months after the Congressional inquiry began.
The IRS did not even attempt to retrieve that data. It cavalierly recites: “There is no record of any attempt by any IRS IT employee to recover data from any Blackberry device assigned to Lois Lerner in response to the Congressional investigations or this investigation,” according to Stephen Manning, Deputy Chief Information Officer for Strategy & Modernization.
More information on what the DOJ actually told Fitton:
While recovering specific data from recycled back-up tapes is conceivable (i.e. in cases where the newer backup used less of the tape than the backup you are interested in, there may be recoverable data at the end of the tape), it would be a huge amount of work. There’s no guarantee that any of the lost Lerner emails would be found, considering that the tapes were recycled multiple times, which reduces the odds that the desired information wasn’t overwritten, and considering that Lerner’s emails are mixed together with those of many other IRS employees sharing the same email server.
Prosecuting Rick Perry for applying a veto is also a huge amount of work, but his crime was only threatening to punish a convicted felon, who refused to be ethical. Denying equal protection under the law to thousands of people nationwide is a much larger crime, so some work is necessary.
I think it’s crazy to indict a governor for threatening a veto. Threatening vetoes is what governors do. It’s like investigating an IRS official for making a referral to the DOJ….
Welcome to Chicago politics.
You would think if they were making referrals to the DoJ, then they would have emails to that affect. If they don’t have emails, then this looks like a fishing expedition by IRS which, unlike a Constitutional Veto, is an abuse of official authority.
You would think if they were making referrals to the DoJ, then they would have emails to that affect. [sic]
Indeed, we know about Lerner talking to the DOJ thanks to emails that the IRS released.
this looks like a fishing expedition by IRS which, unlike a Constitutional Veto, is an abuse of official authority.
Wait, fishing expeditions are an abuse of official authority? Has anyone told Darrel Issa?
Yes, several people told Issa that a fishing expedition by the IRS is an abuse of power. I’m glad you finally noticed. And it is the job of the Congressional Oversight committee to investigate these things.
“Indeed, we know about Lerner talking to the DOJ thanks to emails that the IRS released.”
Earlier you said there was no conspiracy but we know that Lerner was colluding with both the FEC and DOJ to persecute political dissidents.
“It’s like investigating an IRS official for making a referral to the DOJ….”
Lerner didn’t find a non-Democrat group breaking the law and pass that info onto the DOJ. She asked the DOJ to look at all of the non-Democrat groups and prosecute them for any violations found in order to make an example of them. There was no probable cause. It was a naked partisan action to shut down the political opposition.
She asked the DOJ to look at all of the non-Democrat groups
Really? Did she send them a list? How many were there? As I’ve written before, you have an active imagination.
“Really? Did she send them a list?”
You are claiming that Lerner talked to the DOJ about a group not a group of groups. Where is your evidence of that? The emails show Lerner was targeting a group of groups not a specific group. She didn’t say a group was breaking any laws, she asked to find a group that had broken a law, any law, and prosecute them to intimidate other groups from participating in our Democracy in the same way Democrat groups do.
Since it would take a “huge amount of work”, we shouldn’t do it?
Lerner et al. undertook a “huge amount of work” to obfuscate.
But an administration official with knowledge of Friday’s conversation said Judicial Watch’s statement, which runs counter to months of statements from a variety of administration and IRS higher-ups, was off-base.
The administration official said Justice Department lawyers had dropped no bombshells last week, and Judicial Watch was mischaracterizing what the government had said.
So why should we trust an unnamed “administration official” for the official answer? My gosh, do you think we’re that stupid?
The original claim was by an unnamed administration official as well. So you have two claims, both from unnamed administration officials. The second was made directly to journalists, the first one was made to Tom Fitton, who then paraphrased it to journalists. The second one is consistent with other information we have, including sworn testimony, and makes sense in terms of the technology involved. The first makes no sense, either organizationally or technically, but does fit into Fitton’s agenda.
Go ahead and believe Fitton if you like, but you will look foolish when this secret backup system never materializes.
So if you got a tip on an alleged murderer, you wouldn’t check it out? Police do it all the time. The police must look awfully foolish for doing so.
“you have two claims, both from unnamed administration officials. The second was made directly to journalists”
Lol, you think the Obama administration is trustworthy. The Obama administration has zero credibility.
But looking foolish has never bothered you as you keep telling us health care costs are dropping thanks to Obamacare.
I never said that health care costs were falling, I said that the rate of health care cost growth had fallen, because it has.
“While recovering specific data from recycled back-up tapes is conceivable (i.e. in cases where the newer backup used less of the tape than the backup you are interested in, there may be recoverable data at the end of the tape), it would be a huge amount of work. ”
So what? Are the rights of citizens not worth effort in your opinion?
“There’s no guarantee that any of the lost Lerner emails would be found, considering that the tapes were recycled multiple times, which reduces the odds that the desired information wasn’t overwritten, and considering that Lerner’s emails are mixed together with those of many other IRS employees sharing the same email server.”
Once again you ignore the fact that there should have been paper copies made in that case.
Jim hasn’t been voxplained yet why they would destroy her blackberry in the midst of a criminal investigation.
The blackberry was destroyed long after Lerner got a new computer so whatever emails were on the blackberry should have sync’d up with her new computer.
I don’t know much about Blackberries, but if you’re right that “whatever emails were on the blackberry should have sync’d up with her new computer”, then no emails were lost when they destroyed the Blackberry (since they did hold onto the computer, and the emails from the computer have been turned over to investigators).
No, the IRS claims it can’t get all of the emails. So were they lying?
They should have been present on the email server with devices pulling them down as requested. Perhaps sender, subject, ect would have been present on all of the devices (desktop, laptop, blackberry, ipad(?)) but not necessarily the actual emails.
The IRS contends that emails were to be backed up on a person’s computer but each computer is not an email server. The emails should also be on the server. Why wouldn’t the IRS have pulled the emails off the mail server after the hard drive crash? If all the devices sync through a server, why were there still missing emails?
The IRS keeps contradicting previous testimony and each time they do it cuts the legs out from under Obama’s defenders.
Why would they destroy any device during ongoing investigations and litigation?
Lerner’s blackberry likely contained non-IRS email records that Lerner was using to conduct official business. It could have also held PDFs and other records. This is pretty sketchy.
Was Lerner the only IRS employee to get a new phone? How often do IRS employees get new smart phones? It is unlikely that the federal government would purchase just a single smart phone rather than purchase them for a large group of employees.
Or is Obamas IRS’s story that the blackberry “broke” just after an investigation was announced just like the hard drive “crashed” right after congressional inquiries into IRS misdeeds?
“I don’t know much about Blackberries, but if you’re right that “whatever emails were on the blackberry should have sync’d up with her new computer”, then no emails were lost when they destroyed the Blackberry (since they did hold onto the computer, and the emails from the computer have been turned over to investigators).”
More to the point, Jim, is that the blackberry was wiped after the investigation began.
That’s obstruction of justice.
Rand: Lois Lerner’s “Missing” Emails. It turns out that they aren’t really.
It turns out they are, still.
Tom Fitton: it turns out the federal government backs up all computer records
It turns out they don’t.
Tom Fitton: “There’s no such thing as Lois Lerner’s missing emails. It’s all been a big lie. They’ve been lying to the courts, the American people, and to Congress.”
It turns out that Fitton misunderstood, there are missing emails, there’s no big lie.
Remember how outraged everyone was here when the House GOP announced that Nicole Flax had also lost 2 years of email in a hard disk crash. Except that the IRS had never said that she’d lost any emails? This story is deja vu all over again.
It turns out that Fitton misunderstood, there are missing emails, there’s no big lie.
Complete bull hockey on your part. This came from an “unnamed administration official”.
Congratulations, Obama’s IRS is violating the law, still.
Over a year after the scandal was leaked to the public and several years after multiple investigations and lawsuits the defense of Obama’s IRS is that it will take too long to restore the backups…
What Jim tells us is that, oh well, the investigation has gone on over a year, they haven’t found any proof so therefore they should stop. It’s just a witch hunt.
It’s been explained to him – many times by many people – that the evidence hasn’t been seen yet. Some of the evidence has been slow walked and then claimed to be inadvertantly destroyed.
We don’t believe them. And for very good reason,
I have absolutely NO DOUBT that Jim would have called off the Watergate hearings prior to the 1973 hearings where Butterfield testified. (sarc) That’s the testimony where it was revealed that Nixon had the tape system in the Oval Office. The investigators didn’t even know they existed until that day. Before that day they had a 5th rate burglary and nothing pointed to the President.
It then took months of legal wrangling to force Nixon – FORCE Nixon – to hand over the tapes. Those tapes sank him.
The big difference between these two cases is that we *knew* the emails should be backed up. We didn’t know about the Nixon tapes.
Jim is probably too young to remember all this…a mere callow youth when it happened. Jim is still callow.
We do not trust this administration. They have a 6 year record of lying. Lying on big and little things. Lying about this issue as specifically.
The following is not a timeline Jim, just a partial list – so don’t get your panties in a bunch:
At first they denied the violation of citizens’ rights occurred.
They said oh yes it occurred, but was the act of rogue agents in Cleveland
Obama said there was not a smidgen of corruption
When asked for the emails they said it would take months (should have taken about 2-3 days)
Then they announced they cannot supply them because Lerner’s emails were lost in a disk drive failure.
Now after judicial hammering (same as in the Nixon case) they are changing their story, according to Fitton.
When called to testify, Lerner takes the 5th.
Now on that last one, it’s totally within Lerner’s right to take the 5th. I wouldn’t begrudge her that.
At the same time we are not required to then shut our brains off. We are also perfectly justified in becoming suspicious of Lerner – the 5th is not a magic wand. It does not mean investigators should ignore the implications of taking the 5th. That’s the double edge of the 5th – the Founders well understood that the 5th will chum the waters. This, they knew, is as it should be.
But all these things do nothing but chum the waters.
The slow walking, stonewalling and obstruction of justice in this case is no different than in the Watergate hearings. It’s what people do when they have something to hide.
The point, jJm, and it’s been told to you several times by many people, is that investigations take a lot of time even when the people being investigated co operate. I know you hate to hear that but it simply does. I would agree with you that it’s a witch hunt had Lerner openly and transparently acted.
But she did not.
So the investigators have to fight the stone walling, slow walking, lies, prevarication and dissembling. That takes time. OF COURSE you don’t have proof when the evidence is kept from you. And you love to say “Oh well disks were scratched. Bad stuff happens. Nothing to see here folks. Move along.”.
But all of that is what ought and does keep the investigation alive. And after some serious judicial hammering, cracks are beginning to appear in the dike.
And you don’t like that.
The other aspects of this case which demands continued investigation are:
1) citizens rights were violated…..
2) ….directly impacting elections (which need to be trusted by the populace)…..
3) …and no one has been punished for the admitted violation.
Lerner was not punished..she resigned with full benefits.
Until someone is punished, the message will be – violate the laws all you like. You’ll get away with it.
This is bad regardless of party. For as Kurt Schlichter writes:
Rejecting The Rule Of Law Means Inviting The Rule Of Guns
George Will puts it well and succinctly:
“GEORGE WILL: I can just hardly wait until the IRS lawyers go into that courtroom and tell the judge that it would be too onerous to stop obstructing justice in this case. That’s a really interesting defense. You know, Lily Tomlin, the comedian, used to have a character, the Bag Lady, who said, ‘no matter how cynical you get you, just can’t keep up.’ And that’s the way it was with the IRS.
Remember this thing began in deceit with Lois Lerner planting a question to reveal this getting ahead of the Inspector General of the IRS report. Then there were a few rogue agents in Cincinnati. The IRS is the most intrusive and potentially punitive institution of the federal government and it is a law enforcement institution and it is off the rails and it is now thoroughly corrupted.
People are saying, ‘well, the Justice Department can take care of this.’ There is a reason why Jack Kennedy had his brother [as] Attorney General. There is a reason why Richard Nixon had his campaign manager John Mitchell [as] Attorney General. It is an inherently political office and it can’t be trusted in cases like this.”
I never said that health care costs were falling, I said that the rate of health care cost growth had fallen, because it has.
Kind of like the rate of government growth has fallen? Every argument I throw your way you’ve got some way to weasel out of my proof.
Obamacare is a failure. No matter how many data points we show you that prove it, you make up something to show it isn’t. But it’s hard to argue with a True Believer.
And there’s every reason to trust the Justice Dept will be fair:
http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-irss-friend-at-justice-1409095962
“I wonder how many other agencies are?”
The DOJ, EPA, and HHS to name a few.
Somebody would have to pay me handsomely to defend a politician as vehemently as Jim defends Obama.
Even if I were being expected to defend a politician who wasn’t a scandal-a-matic like Obama. Big bucks. No checkee, no flak-ee.
“Somebody would have to pay me handsomely to defend a politician as vehemently as Jim defends Obama.”
Baghdad Jim gets paid, not with money (which he probably believes is property of the State anyway, and if you’re talking really big bucks might kick him into the hated one-percent) but the warm afterglow of knowing he has well and truly served Dear Leader.
For the faithful, no payment is required.
I am always stunned by the religiosity applied to Obama by people who are usually so anti-religion. It isn’t just that some Obama supporters view him as a figure that transcends human history like a modern day prophet but that his administration describes supporting his policies as doing God’s work. While having any mention of God in their platform was booed by Democrats at their convention, the Obama administration has appropriated religious institutions to further his own political agenda when it comes to immigration and the environment.
For all of the fear-mongering of a Christian Theocracy taking over the united states, Democrats seem totally unaware of their own Church of Obama.
They’re no anti-religion. They’re just anti-Christian.
I work for a large corporate enterprise that employees over 30,000 people worldwide. We have a number of vast and expansive data backup and disaster recovery systems in place because it gives shareholders piece of mind and also meets compliance by government regulators. We have an application that backs up the contents of individual client computer’s hard drives to a backup server. The clients side backups maintain 5 distinct snapshots of user data that can be retrieved from the backup server that in of itself is backed up. Usually when a hard drive fails about 95% of the time I’m able to recover 100% of the user data. In the event that the drive is completely wasted I just pull up the users backup account and recover all their emails, documents, desktop items, internet favorites, and even recover the registry settings for their mapped network drives and printers.
We also backup our email servers with daily snapshots that are overwritten weekly, weekly snapshots that are overwritten monthly, monthly snapshots that are overwritten every 6 months, quarterly snapshots that last a year, and year end snapshots that last in perpetuity. This idea that the IRS “recycles” tapes every 6 months would only make sense to a serious IT professional if the disaster recovery team was headed by an 8 year old. IT services performs regular disaster recovery drills in test environments to practice the art of recovering entire data centers in an event of a major catastrophe. There are systems in place and planned drilling to acquire the backed up data, restore systems to a expected operating state, and make available user data that was destroyed through unplanned contingency. Now, they do push back when someone loses a set of mail folders and the only business need they can specify is that it contained some report that can be rerun. But if someone has a business need that requires data recovery because it involves a subpoena as a result of a serious court litigation then you bet they pull the backups and recover what data they can no matter how onerous the process is. I also work closely with legal, corporate governance, tax services, and HR and the people in these departments are fanatical about retaining their emails for up to 10 years. It boggles the mind that employees of the IRS don’t fall under the same stringent guidelines that are required by corporations across the U.S. And even more so that their IT services aren’t also required to provide the same levels of data retention and disaster recovery that your average large scale corporation is required to provide; especially considering the IRS gets 12 billion dollars a year to operate.
“This idea that the IRS “recycles” tapes every 6 months would only make sense to a serious IT professional if the disaster recovery team was headed by an 8 year old.”
No doubt. It strains credulity that there could ever be a system such as that in the days of cheap mass storage. But then a lot of what the Feds have said strains credulity.
+1 to all of Josh’s comment, then there is this…
But if someone has a business need that requires data recovery because it involves a subpoena as a result of a serious court litigation then you bet they pull the backups and recover what data they can no matter how onerous the process is. I also work closely with legal, corporate governance, tax services, and HR and the people in these departments are fanatical about retaining their emails for up to 10 years. It boggles the mind that employees of the IRS don’t fall under the same stringent guidelines that are required by corporations across the U.S.
Anybody who has ever worked IT for a Fortune 500 company knows what Josh wrote. It is what a legitimate business does. That’s why what Judicial Watch reported makes sense to average Americans. Why wouldn’t the US government do what any honest business would do?
The government does many things that businessmen would be jailed for if they did them.