How are they getting away with it?
…mull over what might happen if regulators found significant evidence to implicate Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein in an insider trading scheme.
Let’s say Blankfein asserted his Fifth Amendment right not to answer any questions. Say Goldman was subpoenaed to provide all of Blankfein’s emails. Goldman replied that, instead of complying with the subpoena, it was itself reviewing the emails in question and was considering which ones to release.
Now imagine that, nearly a year later, Goldman admitted that it had not, in fact, reviewed the emails in question, because they had been lost in a computer crash two months before it claimed to be reviewing them. Imagine Goldman also said copies of the emails were lost, because while under subpoena, it had destroyed the “backup tapes” (whatever those are) that held them and that it had also thrown away Blankfein’s actual hard drive.
The thing about dogs eating homework is, it could actually happen. This can’t.
Laws are for the little people, like Goldman Sachs, not the IRS.
…Obama’s assertion that there was “not even a smidgeon of corruption” in the IRS’ attacks on right-wing groups does not reassure. Obama cannot have known there was no corruption given the mountain of evidence that has yet to be produced and now appears to have been destroyed. He could believe there was no corruption because he has faith in everyone who works under him, or he could know there was corruption and be lying about it, but he can’t know there was no corruption. It’s impossible.
For all he knows, there’s a Lois Lerner email that says, “I want you to go after these Tea Party bastards with everything you got. Use every trick you can to keep them on the sidelines for this election cycle. Nuke those fascists.”
IRS Commissioner John Koskinen is sworn in during a congressional hearing on the missing emails from the hard drive of former director Lois Lerner.Photo: Getty Images
Lerner wouldn’t have pleaded the Fifth unless she had reason to believe that there was potential illegality and it could be tied to her.
I wonder if Kyle Smith was influenced by my tweet the other day?
Note: Unlike the IRS's ridiculous email fairy tale, it actually is possible for dogs to eat homework. #StrangeButTrue
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) June 14, 2014
And the picture is certainly apt.
[Early afternoon update]
“The emails that came out were bad enough. The ones that were destroyed must have been really, really incriminating.”
How do they get away with it? Perhaps everyone has a reason for the Tea Party to fail. That is, both Democrats and Republicans want their failure, but have to present different faces in light of public perception. Much like the Bootlegger and Baptist example from Prohibition.
Kind of like how the Soviets took a breather before capturing Warsaw from the Nazis?
I never hear about it on CBS radio, ABC radio, or the local evening or network news. Not on the top of the Yahoo or Google feeds. Nobody then really knows about it.
But the conservative side has an equal voice in the national media, so it’s a non issue. /sarc
A classic way of finding “lost” emails is in the archives at the other end. The question of the year of course is, were Lois Lerner and the gang of six coordinating with the White House.
I saw a clip of Jay Carney the other day, very smugly asserting that the White House had found no Lerner emails on their end. Then I saw that the White House was made aware six weeks before the Congress that the IRS had definitively lost all its copies of a critical two years’ worth of Lerner+6 emails.
And 2 + 2 added up. There’s probably not much point in looking at White House (or DOJ) archives for Lerner+6 emails now; they’ve had at least six weeks to scrub.
But looking for traces of the scrub might prove fruitful. Can’t get them for the crime? Then go after the coverup. This one, possibly done in some haste, may have left tracks if someone skilled enough gets in and looks, hard, soon.
There may also be tracks on the IRS end, if only circumstantial, in the timing and disposition of the Lerner+6 “disk crashes”. And now of course there’s also the archives of the fired-weeks-later backups contractor to check for traces. (Or for full backups? Somehow I doubt that, but you never know.)
If, as I said, someone skilled enough gets in and looks, hard, soon.
It seems to me that they are getting away with it because there doesn’t; seem to be enough energy and effort to go out there and find the emails which must surely exist.
Imagine Goldman also said copies of the emails were lost, because while under subpoena, it had destroyed the “backup tapes” (whatever those are) that held them
“Imagine”, indeed. Lerner’s hard disk crashed in June, 2011. The last backup tapes that might have contained any of the lost messages was recycled six months later, in December, 2011. The House did not subpoena any of Lerner’s emails until 2013.
What’s imaginary is the notion that any Federal department only keeps their data for a short time and that Lehrner’s data was so irrelevant that she wouldn’t try to recover the lost information.
Do you do that, Jim? Do you just blow off the lost data and not try to recover it whenever your hard drive crashes?
AND the IRS has admitted that the hard drives of 6 others under investigation crashed also…also losing the data for the exact same period…
The IRS has admitted no such thing. That’s a story made up by the House GOP and its media arm. The GOP asked the IRS if any other employees had computer crashes; the IRS reported that six had. They didn’t say that any of the six had lost data, much less that they’d all lost data from the same period as Lerner. The fact that you keep repeating this lie speaks volumes.
AND this is a massive, illegal coverup which ,I suspect, goes right to the White House.
You’ll believe that regardless of the facts.
Sorry, that was supposed to be a reply to Gregg’s post, below.
You can’t blame the GOP for the Obama administration lying in congressional testimony.
The IRS told the GOP that six other computers crashed, the GOP Ways & Means Committee lied that the crashes resulted in lost emails, and the GOP media stretched that lie into a claim that the lost emails were from the same period as Lerner’s.
If that isn’t the case — if the IRS actually told the committee that those six crashes each lost emails from 2009 to 2011 — then why doesn’t the committee produce the letter? Koskinen basically accused the committee of lying in its press release; if they weren’t lying, why didn’t they refute his claim?
Why do you mention a letter?
Speaking of letters, where is the evidence supporting the IRS referral of applicants to the DoJ? Why didn’t Koskinen hold that data and redact it prior to jumping to conclusions? Where are the 6103 Lerner emails Koskinen claimed he was reviewing?
Why do you mention a letter?
I’m assuming that the committee sent their question about other computer crashes to the IRS in writing, and that the IRS responded in kind. It would be very odd for investigators to pose official questions in a way that doesn’t leave a written record.
Speaking of letters, where is the evidence supporting the IRS referral of applicants to the DoJ?
Didn’t the IRS send that evidence to the DOJ?
Where are the 6103 Lerner emails Koskinen claimed he was reviewing?
At the IRS?
Oral arguments and discussions are odd to you? If you way so, Jim. But I think you’ll find that courts understand such concepts extremely well.
“The IRS told the GOP that six other computers crashed… If that isn’t the case”
So, you don’t know any details and are making assumptions while angry that others are also making assumptions.
Why is it the there are no details? Because the Obama administration is intentionally misleading congress and the country.
Lerner did try to recover the data — the hard disk was sent to the same experts who recover data for tax fraud prosecutions.
Obviously the IRS should have had procedures to back up individual computers, and/or a policy that let employees keep all their mail on centrally backed-up servers. But Lerner didn’t make those IT policies, policies that predate the Obama administration.
Why would more regulations have solved this problem when she didn’t follow the policies already in place? And why blame regulations when it was the illegal actions of the Obama administration that is the root cause?
The IRS did have procedures to back up employee emails, and point of fact, her emails were backed up. The question was why were they not restored from the back up? She was leading what she claims was a potential criminal investigation that was referred to the DoJ, and her communications with the DoJ were not important to recover from the backups that existed?
The backups only had emails that had been moved off the server in the previous six months; messages moved off the server in 2009 or 2010 weren’t on the tapes. But it’s definitely worth asking the IRS IT people whether they made any attempt to restore messages that were moved off the server in 2011.
She was leading what she claims was a potential criminal investigation that was referred to the DoJ, and her communications with the DoJ were not important to recover from the backups that existed?
Presumably the DOJ still had their copies of those communications.
According to IRS testimony last night, the emails were backed up but were never recovered despite Lerner being the subject of an IG investigation. That is destruction of evidence.
Your timeline doesn’t make sense. By the time the IG investigation started in 2012 the backup tapes from before Lerner’s mid-2011 crash had already been overwritten.
Your timeline doesn’t make sense. By the time the IG investigation started in 2012 the backup tapes from before Lerner’s mid-2011 crash had already been overwritten.
Interesting how you take the IRS’s word as fact. We don’t know that. Even if we did, it should be obvious to you that such a policy would be very effective for destroying evidence in this investigation and that it were illegal to do so by regulations that have been cited here before.
“Lerner’s hard disk crashed in June, 2011. The last backup tapes that might have contained any of the lost messages was recycled six months later, in December, 2011. The House did not subpoena any of Lerner’s emails until 2013.”
AND when they subpoena’d the emails it was slowwalked and then it took a year for the IRS to declare that the emails were lost due to disk crash. Many months after the White House was told this.
AND the records were not kept as required by law
AND the IRS has admitted that the hard drives of 6 others under investigation crashed also…also losing the data for the exact same period…
AND those emails were not kept as required by law…..
AND the Congress was not informed of this until they asked a very pointed and specific question.
AND this is a massive, illegal coverup which ,I suspect, goes right to the White House.
You are upset the House didn’t subpoena Lerner’s emails prior to the IG investigation but not upset the emails were destroyed after the investigation was initiated?
Not sure why you think asking for the emails earlier would have made a difference considering they were destroyed when it was known the IG was days away from opening an investigation, years before congress started its own investigation.
I’m upset that the NY Post would publish obviously false statements about subpoenaed documents being destroyed.
But you are not upset about emails and backups being destroyed or the acts of political persecution by the Obama administration? And you are not upset about the Obama administration’s endless lies about what took place and what emails they do and don’t have?
This looks like the IRS intentionally misled congress and the media and then provided different information in an effort to discredit both for acting on the bad information supplied by the IRS.
You should be less upset with the media than you are with the IRS intentionally misleading a congressional investigation.
I’m not convinced that there were any acts of political persecution, or endless lies.
If the committee thinks it was mislead by the IRS re. the six computer crashes they should lay out the evidence. The fact that they haven’t makes it pretty clear that it’s the House GOP that lied about what the IRS reported.
” I’m not convinced that there were any acts of political persecution,”
So you don’t believe that IG report or the targeting of donors which led to that investigation?
We know the IRS persecuted non-Democrat groups and donors while giving preferential treatment to Democrat activist groups. You once said it wasn’t like Obama was sending people to camps but we now know Lerner, the DOJ, and Democrat politicians were colluding to throw people in prisons based on perceived political affiliation.
But Jim isn’t convinced and nothing will ever convince him because he is open minded, believes in the transparency of government, and stands for the freedoms that all
AmericansDemocrats get to enjoy.So you don’t believe that IG report or the targeting of donors which led to that investigation?
I don’t think the keyword targeting amounted to political persecution, since there’s no evidence that it was pursued for political aims.
we now know Lerner, the DOJ, and Democrat politicians were colluding to throw people in prisons based on perceived political affiliation.
No, we know that Lerner wanted the DOJ to investigate violations of the law.
No, we know that Lerner wanted the DOJ to investigate violations of the law.
She wanted the DoJ do to that so badly that she violated the law by sending it confidential taxpayer information, even though there was no evidence of violation of the law.
If Lerner broke the law by sending confidential information to the DOJ, it should be trivial to prove — just look at what she sent the DOJ! But when Ways and Means referred Lerner for criminal prosecution it didn’t even make that charge. Instead it says:
There’s nothing about sending confidential information to the DOJ, it’s all about three times when 6103 material was sent to or from her personal email account. Which, the referral notes, is only illegal if someone else had access to Lerner’s account, and accessed the confidential information — and there’s no evidence for that.
“…it should be trivial to prove — just look at what she sent the DOJ!”
Indeed, it should be trivial. I can go to my Yahoo email account right now, type Kickstarter in the search bar, and all correspondence between me and Kickstarter shows up within seconds.
So, assuming that Search isn’t a unique feature to Yahoo email, it ought to be trivial to just look at Lois Lerner’s emails and… oh.
“The lovely Ms. Lerner is NOT making an obscene gesture in this picture! That is a secret IRS hand-signal that means, ‘I love America and I love liberty, and I would never do anything to hurt either.’ Her patriotism puts you wingnuts to shame!”–Baghdad Jim
Yeah, she really isn’t making an obscene gesture. Photoshop.
Of course it’s photoshopped. But Baghdad Jim spastically and unthinkingly reacts to anything that reflects negatively on Dear Leader and his minions.
My pedantry switch was stuck in the On position.
That’s one creepy email from Sarah Ingram. But its not specifically stating anything that is incriminating, so we can ignore it.
Comments from Senator X:
Senator X is, of course, wrong. It doesn’t matter how many servers an email goes through, unless the servers keep archives of every message they see (and, in general, they don’t). You’ll have more luck looking at the servers at the sender and recipient ends, where it’s more likely that a copy survives. But that is more difficult when you’ve lost one end of the conversation, and don’t know who the people on the other end were.
The comparison to the Watergate tapes is ridiculous as well. There are innocent and not-innocent explanations for the 18 minute gap, and without other evidence we can’t know which was the case.
Senator X, by the way, is Democrat Patrick Leahy, being quoted about missing Bush White House emails in 2007. Conspiracy theories about lost emails are a bipartisan problem.
I think Nixon was holding a big magnet when he was messing with the tapes. The resulting missing minutes was purely accidental.
I’m dead serious. You can’t prove I’m wrong.
It doesn’t matter how many servers an email goes through, unless the servers keep archives of every message they see (and, in general, they don’t)
I realize Jim, you can not help but lie. Here, you couldn’t lie in your statement, so you had to make a parenthetical to fit in your lie. Microsoft recommends companies back up the transaction log of Exchange Servers, because that is where all emails records one through, every single one of them. The IRS contracted to a company that is a Microsoft Gold Partner, which means they follow Microsoft practices for server solutions, including archival processes.
So the question Jim, why make such an obvious lie? Is it because your credibility is already crap here, yet Rand let’s you post comments, thus there is no harm to you in lying? Even the IRS isn’t claiming Lerner’s emails were never backed up. Only you, Jim, are trying to suggest it. The IRS claims the backups were destroyed for budgetary concerns. So Jim, why do you make up these lies?
Microsoft recommends companies back up the transaction log of Exchange Servers
A transaction log does not contain the contents of emails.
Even the IRS isn’t claiming Lerner’s emails were never backed up.
Emails that were moved from the Exchange server to Lerner’s computer weren’t subsequently backed up. They would have been backed up before then (assuming they were on the server long enough to be backed up), but those tapes were recycled after six months.
A terminology clarification: a backup is a snapshot of a system’s state at a point in time. An archive is a compilation of data over a period of time. The IRS kept snapshots of its server-stored email going back six months. It didn’t keep an ongoing archive. It didn’t keep either backups or archives of the state of Lerner’s desktop computer.
A transaction log would show who Lerner was corresponding with and allow investigators to get their emails as well, which is why the IRS won’t produce it.
Has the House even asked the IRS for the Exchange transaction logs?
Has the House even asked the IRS for the Exchange transaction logs?
Why would they do so now, idiot? The IRS already claimed they destroyed the backups of the relevant logs. The question is why did the IRS destroy the logs. The notion that magnetic tapes are expensive rather than compliance with the law is not a good answer.
I think it’s a sort of weird reversal of a rule from Sun Tzu’s Art of War “When you surround an army, leave an outlet free.” Here, I’d say it’s “Always have an excuse, no matter how flimsy, ready for your supporters.”
Wow, Jim comes out swinging in defense of… Nixon? Look what Obama has done to you lol.
Not in defense of Nixon, in defense of reason. The 18 minute gap wasn’t proof of wrongdoing, and Nixon wasn’t forced out over it — he was forced out by the things we know he did, not the things we suspect he did.
We know the IRS broke a few laws and that Obama’s DoJ has yet to hold anyone accountable. At this point in time, Nixon’s DoJ had already appointed a special prosecutor. Sure, Nixon would later fire the first special prosecutor, but he then appointed a second one. Obama has yet to appoint one. Why not? If he has nothing to hide, why not find out why civil servants were violating the rights of US citizens?
Why is congress wasting time with politically appointed cronies if they want actual facts? They should call the lower level IT managers or workers who may actually be able to explain why archives of emails were not maintained per federal regulations.
The explanation that backup tapes are only maintained for six months in a professional environment sounds incredibly fishy. My experience indicates that multiple levels of backups are typically maintained with different retention policies. More frequent incremental backups may indeed get recycled in 6 to 12 months, but there should also be full backups stored for much longer periods from which a complete archive can be pulled from. Not to follow minimal industry standards when dealing with records as sensitive as those of the IRS (ie. the IRS can jail and/or destroy a tax payer) is criminal negligence.
Let’s see what IT workers, even those at the IRS, are willing to admit to their own gross incompetence. I suspect such testimony would likely yield something more willful than accidental with regards to the emails.
BTW, I saw an email where Lois Lerner ask someone to always copy her assistant in all emails because here assistant was more on top of email. Was congress smart enough to supeana her assistant’s emails as well? I hope they weren’t dumb enough to believe the IRS would turn them over on their own.