Of course it does. They’re just trying to run out the clock.
23 thoughts on “The IRS Cover Up”
A pair of IRS technicians said under oath that they tried unsuccessfully to recover data from former agency official Lois Lerner’s hard drive, according to new court documents released Monday.
So the IT techs are in on the cover up? What’s their motive?
Idiot reply as usual, Jim. Nobody but you suggested the IRS techs were in on it, but they very likely were not competent to do the recovery. That’s why there is an industry for the specific purpose of recovering failed drives.
Don’t you ever give up, you pathetic excuse for a rational being?
If the techs weren’t in on it, what’s your theory of the crime? That Lerner knew enough about hard disks to damage hers in a way that IRS forensic techs — the techs who recover data that tax cheats try to hide from the IRS — would not be able to recover her data?
Nobody but you suggested the IRS techs were in on it
Check out the replies that followed yours. Plenty of people are so invested in the conspiracy theory that they’re ready to believe just about anything, including the idea that these IT techs could be committing perjury as part of a cover up. Just look at the title of this thread!
“f the techs weren’t in on it, what’s your theory of the crime? That Lerner knew enough about hard disks to damage hers in a way that IRS forensic techs — the techs who recover data that tax cheats try to hide from the IRS — would not be able to recover her data? ”
How about:
There was nothing whatsoever wrong with the drives.
You asked for a motive, we’ve supplied several.
Now you call us conspiracists.
Questioner: What is buried in Grant’s tomb?
Answer 1: Maybe Grant?
Answer 2: I dunno, gold?
Answer 3: His sword? His uniform?
Questioner: You’re all nut jobs!
They were just making excuses because they were buried under all the drives that had also suddenly crashed. They were also smart enough not to do something that would get their entire extended families audited for the rest of their natural lives.
Their motive could be their jobs. Intimidation is a popular tactic on the left.
What’s the motive for all of these illegal activities still continuing today? We were told that it was just bad apples and that the activities stopped yet it appears the activity was directed from the highest levels of the IRS and is still ongoing.
yet it appears
Only to those who want to see it that way.
Only to those with rational minds. Only to those who have been watching this scandal get deeper and the explanations more and more ridiculous for the last 462 days.
They are supposedly IT techs, yet they didn’t check the email server or the multiple redundant backups?
According to the earlier IRS letter they’re forensic data recovery techs, they don’t have anything to do with servers or backups, just getting information off hard drives. Lerner didn’t just use her computer for email, there was other data on the hard drive to be recovered.
Getting some of the lost emails off the backup tapes would have been a big project. The tapes were meant to allow the server admins to restore the entire system after a server hard disk failure. In this case you’d be using them to get back messages that had once been stored on the server, but had subsequently been deleted. So you’d need to do something like:
1) Set up a spare email server
2) Restore the server from the six-month old backup tapes
3) Copy off any of Lerner’s emails that aren’t still on the real server (i.e. that’d been deleted since the backup)
4) Repeat steps 2) and 3) for the next 180 or so sets of daily backup tapes
That would give you any emails that were on the server overnight in the previous six months. It still wouldn’t give you messages that were moved off the server more than six months back. Given that Lerner wasn’t under investigation when the hard disk crash happened, it isn’t at all surprising they didn’t make a heroic effort to restore those emails.
“That would give you any emails that were on the server overnight in the previous six months.”
Apparently you have a serious reading comprehension problem…or you’ve never bothered to read the Act – which has been linked for you many times….or you never read the quotes from the Act….which have been displayed for you several times.
All this is covered. There should be paper.
“they’re forensic data recovery techs, they don’t have anything to do with servers or backups,”
Read what you wrote there, Jim, and explain how that makes any sense whatsoever. HINT: note the relationship between “forensic” and “backup”.
The answer, of course, is it doesn’t make any sense. It’s just the sort of thing someone says to the clueless when trying to pull the wool over their eyes (“if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance…”).
Problem is, there is a significant portion of the population that knows enough about computers and email, and you can’t baffle those people with bullshit.
There should be paper.
Then why are the investigators taking sworn statements from IT techs? The House doesn’t just want official records subject to the official records act, they want any and all emails.
explain how that makes any sense whatsoever
The skills involved in recovering data from hard drives (after it’d been purposely deleted, for example, or after a software or hardware malfunction), and the skills involved in restoring the state of an email server from backup tapes, are quite different. It would be typical for a technician to specialize, and not be expert at both.
In any case, there is no evidence that the technicians who’ve given testimony were ever asked to do anything other than attempt to recover data from the failed hard drive. Their testimony is very interesting — you can read it here. John Minsek testifies that he actually disassembled the hard drive and observed “a well-defined concentric scoring around the middle of the top platter”. That’s consistent with a head crash. He tried swapping parts of the failed drive with a couple donor drives of the same model, but was unable to recover any data.
It’s hard to read Minsek’s testimony and doubt that serious efforts were made to recover the data on that drive.
Groups are still being delayed and harassed and Lerner was plotting to throw people in jail after the IG report was complete. Obama says one thing but the actions of his administration show another thing, as usual.
They’ll all be pardoned anyway.
They’ll all be pardoned anyway.
The list of presidential pardons come Jan 19, 2017 should be very interesting.
Also this gem, “The Obama administration has argued in both the True the Vote and Judicial Watch cases that the government had no obligation to inform the groups about the missing emails because the hard drive crashed almost two years before the Tea Party controversy broke. ”
The Obama administration is claiming that the victims of his administration have no right to evidence during the time period the illegal activities took place and only should have emails after the IG report was released to the public. That is like saying that CCTV footage of a bank robbery is inadmissible because the public didn’t know of the robbery until the crooks had made their getaway.
One IT guy said there was no physical damage to the drive while another says the drive was scratched.
It sounds like John Minsek (the tech in question) concluded that the disk platters had been scratched by the read/write head (which is one way that hard disks fail), based on the results of his tests; you wouldn’t see any sign of that sort of damage on the exterior of the device. Some reporting on his testimony:
The IRS technician who said that former agency Lois Lerner’s hard drive was scratched also said there was no sign the drive was intentionally damaged, according to a partial interview transcript released by Democrats.
“Nothing in my course of the examination and observations made me believe that this was sabotage or any kind of strange physical damage,” said John Minsek, a technician with the IRS’s criminal investigations unit.
Democrats with the House Ways and Means Committee released the partial transcript of Minsek’s interview, after claiming that Republicans on the panel had twisted the technician’s words.
Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) asserted Tuesday that Minsek said in his interview that Lerner’s hard drive was scratched, and data from it was recoverable.
The IRS says that the hard drive crash has left it unable to reproduce an untold number of Lerner’s emails. John Koskinen, the IRS commissioner, said at a Wednesday hearing that the agency was currently deferring to Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration, which is looking into the missing emails.
In the transcript Democrats released Wednesday, Minsek also says that he made a couple different attempts to retrieve data from Lerner’s hard drive, and that he told other IRS information technology staffers “that they may want to consider a third party.”
“I had exhausted all my avenues that I had at my disposal,” Minsek said.
He added that there was “a whole laundry list of reasons” that could have caused the scratch on Lerner’s hard drive, including even a speck of dust.
“It happens. It’s a more common thing than we’d like to think,” Minsek said.
“We have seen many, many times where a drive will produce damage, physical damage for no apparent reason. It’s a mechanical device. And it will fail,” he later added. “I’ve seen physical damage caused by sabotage. And this didn’t appear to me to be that.”
A speck of dust can cause a head crash (where the read/write head hits the spinning disk platter, destroying the drive), but it obviously wouldn’t be externally visible.
In summary, the tech testified that nothing about his examination made him think there was sabotage, and Dave Camp characterized his testimony as indicating that there’d been sabotage. Just another day at the office for the House GOP.
One tech says there was no apparent damage and another finds a scratch. It could be shotty reporting but that is a contradiction.
And the IRS story changes all the time. Why wouldn’t Lerner’s other computer have the emails? Wouldn’t Outlook sync the two devices? Was Lerner backing up her other devices on her desktop computer? And then there are the other people who lost their hard drives where each person was operating under different retention policies that just happened to lose everything.
This is a cover up. The IRS has lied to congress and the courts about what they did and didn’t have. Even if Lerner’s hard drive crashed on its own, it doesn’t excuse the IRS lying about it.
Read the testimony (linked above). One tech only looked at the outside of the drive, the other took it apart and saw damage to the top platter. Neither saw anything that appeared deliberate.
Has it been reported that Lerner had two computers?
Not an IRS issue but HHS – however it has to do with deleting emails:
“An email obtained by Congress shows the top official for Healthcare.gov at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under the Department of Health and Human Services, Marilyn Tavenner, instructed the agency’s top spokesman to “Please delete this email.”
The instruction appears significant for several reasons: First, the email to be deleted included an exchange between key White House officials and CMS officials. Second, the email was dated October 5, 2013, five days into the disastrous launch of HealthCare.gov. Third, federal law requires federal officials to retain copies of –not delete– email exchanges. And fourth, the document to be deleted is covered under Congressional subpoena as well as longstanding Freedom of Information requests made by members of the media (including me).”
A pair of IRS technicians said under oath that they tried unsuccessfully to recover data from former agency official Lois Lerner’s hard drive, according to new court documents released Monday.
So the IT techs are in on the cover up? What’s their motive?
Idiot reply as usual, Jim. Nobody but you suggested the IRS techs were in on it, but they very likely were not competent to do the recovery. That’s why there is an industry for the specific purpose of recovering failed drives.
Don’t you ever give up, you pathetic excuse for a rational being?
If the techs weren’t in on it, what’s your theory of the crime? That Lerner knew enough about hard disks to damage hers in a way that IRS forensic techs — the techs who recover data that tax cheats try to hide from the IRS — would not be able to recover her data?
Nobody but you suggested the IRS techs were in on it
Check out the replies that followed yours. Plenty of people are so invested in the conspiracy theory that they’re ready to believe just about anything, including the idea that these IT techs could be committing perjury as part of a cover up. Just look at the title of this thread!
“f the techs weren’t in on it, what’s your theory of the crime? That Lerner knew enough about hard disks to damage hers in a way that IRS forensic techs — the techs who recover data that tax cheats try to hide from the IRS — would not be able to recover her data? ”
How about:
There was nothing whatsoever wrong with the drives.
You asked for a motive, we’ve supplied several.
Now you call us conspiracists.
Questioner: What is buried in Grant’s tomb?
Answer 1: Maybe Grant?
Answer 2: I dunno, gold?
Answer 3: His sword? His uniform?
Questioner: You’re all nut jobs!
They were just making excuses because they were buried under all the drives that had also suddenly crashed. They were also smart enough not to do something that would get their entire extended families audited for the rest of their natural lives.
Their motive could be their jobs. Intimidation is a popular tactic on the left.
What’s the motive for all of these illegal activities still continuing today? We were told that it was just bad apples and that the activities stopped yet it appears the activity was directed from the highest levels of the IRS and is still ongoing.
yet it appears
Only to those who want to see it that way.
Only to those with rational minds. Only to those who have been watching this scandal get deeper and the explanations more and more ridiculous for the last 462 days.
They are supposedly IT techs, yet they didn’t check the email server or the multiple redundant backups?
According to the earlier IRS letter they’re forensic data recovery techs, they don’t have anything to do with servers or backups, just getting information off hard drives. Lerner didn’t just use her computer for email, there was other data on the hard drive to be recovered.
Getting some of the lost emails off the backup tapes would have been a big project. The tapes were meant to allow the server admins to restore the entire system after a server hard disk failure. In this case you’d be using them to get back messages that had once been stored on the server, but had subsequently been deleted. So you’d need to do something like:
1) Set up a spare email server
2) Restore the server from the six-month old backup tapes
3) Copy off any of Lerner’s emails that aren’t still on the real server (i.e. that’d been deleted since the backup)
4) Repeat steps 2) and 3) for the next 180 or so sets of daily backup tapes
That would give you any emails that were on the server overnight in the previous six months. It still wouldn’t give you messages that were moved off the server more than six months back. Given that Lerner wasn’t under investigation when the hard disk crash happened, it isn’t at all surprising they didn’t make a heroic effort to restore those emails.
“That would give you any emails that were on the server overnight in the previous six months.”
Apparently you have a serious reading comprehension problem…or you’ve never bothered to read the Act – which has been linked for you many times….or you never read the quotes from the Act….which have been displayed for you several times.
All this is covered. There should be paper.
“they’re forensic data recovery techs, they don’t have anything to do with servers or backups,”
Read what you wrote there, Jim, and explain how that makes any sense whatsoever. HINT: note the relationship between “forensic” and “backup”.
The answer, of course, is it doesn’t make any sense. It’s just the sort of thing someone says to the clueless when trying to pull the wool over their eyes (“if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance…”).
Problem is, there is a significant portion of the population that knows enough about computers and email, and you can’t baffle those people with bullshit.
There should be paper.
Then why are the investigators taking sworn statements from IT techs? The House doesn’t just want official records subject to the official records act, they want any and all emails.
explain how that makes any sense whatsoever
The skills involved in recovering data from hard drives (after it’d been purposely deleted, for example, or after a software or hardware malfunction), and the skills involved in restoring the state of an email server from backup tapes, are quite different. It would be typical for a technician to specialize, and not be expert at both.
In any case, there is no evidence that the technicians who’ve given testimony were ever asked to do anything other than attempt to recover data from the failed hard drive. Their testimony is very interesting — you can read it here. John Minsek testifies that he actually disassembled the hard drive and observed “a well-defined concentric scoring around the middle of the top platter”. That’s consistent with a head crash. He tried swapping parts of the failed drive with a couple donor drives of the same model, but was unable to recover any data.
It’s hard to read Minsek’s testimony and doubt that serious efforts were made to recover the data on that drive.
Groups are still being delayed and harassed and Lerner was plotting to throw people in jail after the IG report was complete. Obama says one thing but the actions of his administration show another thing, as usual.
They’ll all be pardoned anyway.
They’ll all be pardoned anyway.
The list of presidential pardons come Jan 19, 2017 should be very interesting.
Perhaps the journalists are not reporting everything accurately but there are conflicts between IRS IT tech’s testimony. One IT guy said there was no physical damage to the drive while another says the drive was scratched. http://thehill.com/policy/finance/214895-irs-officials-no-data-recovered-from-lerner-hard-drive
Also this gem, “The Obama administration has argued in both the True the Vote and Judicial Watch cases that the government had no obligation to inform the groups about the missing emails because the hard drive crashed almost two years before the Tea Party controversy broke. ”
The Obama administration is claiming that the victims of his administration have no right to evidence during the time period the illegal activities took place and only should have emails after the IG report was released to the public. That is like saying that CCTV footage of a bank robbery is inadmissible because the public didn’t know of the robbery until the crooks had made their getaway.
One IT guy said there was no physical damage to the drive while another says the drive was scratched.
It sounds like John Minsek (the tech in question) concluded that the disk platters had been scratched by the read/write head (which is one way that hard disks fail), based on the results of his tests; you wouldn’t see any sign of that sort of damage on the exterior of the device. Some reporting on his testimony:
A speck of dust can cause a head crash (where the read/write head hits the spinning disk platter, destroying the drive), but it obviously wouldn’t be externally visible.
In summary, the tech testified that nothing about his examination made him think there was sabotage, and Dave Camp characterized his testimony as indicating that there’d been sabotage. Just another day at the office for the House GOP.
One tech says there was no apparent damage and another finds a scratch. It could be shotty reporting but that is a contradiction.
And the IRS story changes all the time. Why wouldn’t Lerner’s other computer have the emails? Wouldn’t Outlook sync the two devices? Was Lerner backing up her other devices on her desktop computer? And then there are the other people who lost their hard drives where each person was operating under different retention policies that just happened to lose everything.
This is a cover up. The IRS has lied to congress and the courts about what they did and didn’t have. Even if Lerner’s hard drive crashed on its own, it doesn’t excuse the IRS lying about it.
Read the testimony (linked above). One tech only looked at the outside of the drive, the other took it apart and saw damage to the top platter. Neither saw anything that appeared deliberate.
Has it been reported that Lerner had two computers?
Not an IRS issue but HHS – however it has to do with deleting emails:
“An email obtained by Congress shows the top official for Healthcare.gov at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under the Department of Health and Human Services, Marilyn Tavenner, instructed the agency’s top spokesman to “Please delete this email.”
The instruction appears significant for several reasons: First, the email to be deleted included an exchange between key White House officials and CMS officials. Second, the email was dated October 5, 2013, five days into the disastrous launch of HealthCare.gov. Third, federal law requires federal officials to retain copies of –not delete– email exchanges. And fourth, the document to be deleted is covered under Congressional subpoena as well as longstanding Freedom of Information requests made by members of the media (including me).”
http://sharylattkisson.com/hhs-healthcare-gov-official-delete-this-email/