35 thoughts on “The “Phony” IRS Scandal”

  1. We were played, but we expected that.

    People like Jim trusted Kostkinen and Lerner and all the rest and now…..

    they too are realizing they were played. They kept spouting the lines they were fed “We looked hi and low but they are gone”.

    Poltroons.

    1. “hey too are realizing they were played.”

      You have evidence Jim isn’t still mindlessly parroting the administration?

      1. No direct *actual* evidence, I admit.

        I do harbor the hope that one day, Jim will resist the gaslighting to which this administration subjects the nation. Could be a forlorn hope….

        But I do know that in the general population the cascade has begun. There will always be some holdouts of course,

    1. There is such a law. Lying to Congress under oath is considered perjury. It got Bill Clinton impeached.

        1. Seems to me that crimes in that vein ought to be sanctioned under the direct authority of Congress. Leaving the defense of Congress’ prerogatives to another branch of government is just begging for abuse.

      2. Actually, Clinton was impeached for perjury during a deposition in a civil lawsuit, and suborning perjury through bribes, intimidation, and physical threats to a witness’s family. He never testified before Congress under oath. I don’t think any president ever has, or would.

        1. or would

          The only value in doing so would be in fighting the impeachment charge in the Senate trial. That would be about as advisable as a defendant taking the stand in any criminal trial.

        2. I’m not sure there is a distinction in law between perjury in a court of law and perjury before Congress. Lying under oath is lying under oath either way.

          1. There is. And as I said, no president has ever, or will ever, perjure himself before Congress, because no president will ever testify under oath to Congress.

  3. Congress: “Hey, we need to see an employee’s emails to see if she was going after her political enemies.”

    IRS: “Ok, we will get right on that.”

    Years pass.

    Congress: “So how is the email search going.”

    IRS: “Excellent, we can provide everything you have asked for.”

    Congress: “Sweet, so where are they?”

    IRS: “Oops, they were all inadvertently destroyed.”

    Congress: “When did this happen?”

    IRS: “Oh before you even asked us for them.”

    Congress: “Why didn’t you say so earlier?”

    IRS: “Didn’t think it was relevant.”

    Congress: “Did you try looking for the emails on backups, email servers, and on other IRS computers?”

    IRS: “Dude we checked everything. They can’t be found.”

    Congress: “Well, could you at least try?”

    IRS: “Sure, we will do this all over again.”

    Congress: “So how is the search going?”

    IRS: “Pretty good. We haven’t searched any back ups or email servers but other than that its going fantastic.”

    Congress: “You didn’t check the email servers for missing emails?”

    IRS: “Why would we do that?”

  4. So no hard drives crashed? If this is indeed the case, I want to applaud Jim for all the kabuki theater he did for us.

  5. This reminds me of how Janet Reno “found no evidence” of Clinton wrongdoing.

    She looked everywhere for it. In her in-basket. In her center desk drawer. Underneath her desk blotter. In her wastebasket. Hell, she even looked under her waste-basket! And still, she found absolutely no evidence that the Clintons had ever done anything wrong.

    And since she found none, there must be none. Right?

  6. This story, like so much of the GOP media reporting on the IRS, is bananas. If you read the Judicial Watch press release that is the basis for this story (and, no doubt, dozens of others on a variety of partisan websites), you find JW’s selectively edited summary of what the IRS told the court

    IRS attorneys conceded that they had failed to search the agency’s servers for missing emails because they decided that “the servers would not result in the recovery of any information.” They admitted they had failed to search the agency’s disaster recovery tapes because they had “no reason to believe that the tapes are a potential source of recovering” the missing emails. And they conceded that they had not searched the government-wide back-up system because they had “no reason to believe such a system … even exists.”

    That’s right, it’s the imaginary secret government-wide back-up system! First Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton invents the fantasy of a government-wide secret email back-up system, and the entire right wing media swallows the story whole. But not content to rest on that, he parlays it into a new mini-scandal: the IRS refuses to search his imaginary backup system!

    “When did you stop beating your wife?” is the classic prejudicial question, but I think “Why didn’t you search the non-existent back-up system?” puts it to shame.

    The actual IRS response to the court is here. You should not be shocked to learn that Rand’s summary (“The agency never even looked for Lerner’s emails”) bears no resemblance to what the IRS actually wrote.

    For example, on why the IRS didn’t search email servers:

    [IRS Counsel] Klimas explained that Lerner’s hard drive failure would only have
    affected information stored locally on her hard drive, not information on the Service’s servers.
    Therefore, searching the servers would not result in the recovery of any information lost as a
    result of Lerner’s hard drive failure. Notably, because Service employees’ email mailboxes were
    subject to size limitations, many employees saved old emails locally to their hard drives. (Pl.’s
    Mot. for Status Conf., Ex. 2 at 11-12; Klimas Decl., Ex. H at 3.) Emails saved locally to
    employees’ hard drives were not backed up. (Id, Ex. 2 at 12; Klimas Decl., Ex. H at 3.)

    Why they did not search disaster recovery tapes:

    Disaster recovery tapes were, until May 2013, subject to a
    six-month retention period before being released for reuse (i.e., overwritten) or destroyed.
    (Pl.’s Mot. for Status Conf., Ex. 2 at 11; Klimas Decl., Ex. B at 4-5.) The Service,
    therefore, has no reason to believe that the tapes are a potential source of recovering
    emails lost when Lerner’s hard drive failed in 2011.

    [Do these IRS statements sound familiar? They should, they’re what the IRS has been telling Congress since April. There’s no news here, but the GOP media needs its 2 minute IRS hate, and Judicial Watch is only too happy to pitch in.]

    And of course, why they failed to search the non-existent government-wide backup system:

    Citing the supposed content of a conversation
    with Justice Department attorney Klimas, supposed discussions with unidentified
    “government experts,” and a letter which relies solely on a Judicial Watch press release,
    Judicial Watch claims that Lerner’s lost mails can be retrieved from a “government-
    wide backup system.” (Pl.’s Discov. Mot., 3-5, 8.) But Klimas never discussed such a
    system and has no reason to believe such a system, if it even exists, backs up Service
    ernails; the Commissioner of Internal Revenue testified that no such system backs up
    Service emails; and Judicial Watch cannot rely on its own assertions and hearsay to
    establish good cause for granting its motion.

    1. In case Jim’s comment is tl;dr; here is the synaposis:

      Jim agrees with the IRS excuse for not checking the servers. That’s all he added to the discussion, which is nothing.

      The IRS excuse is, “we don’t believe in data backups, so we didn’t check them. Just because you believe in data backups doesn’t mean data backups exist or would work.”

      1. Jim agrees with the IRS excuse for not checking the servers.

        JW: Show us Lerner’s emails

        IRS: Here are the emails from the email servers and her desktop. She lost some emails from her desktop in 2011 when her hard disk failed. We recovered some of those from other IRS employees’ mailboxes on the server; others weren’t on the server.

        JW: Show us those missing emails

        IRS: Here are sworn statements from the technicians who tried and failed to recover the data on the failed hard disk

        JW: Why haven’t you searched the servers for the missing emails?

        IRS: We already handed over everything from the email servers, remember? The messages you are asking about are considered “missing” precisely because they aren’t on the servers.

        JW: Why haven’t you searched the backup tapes?

        IRS: The tapes only have messages that were on the server in the six months before May, 2013. The messages you’re asking about were taken off the server before June, 2011. The backup tapes that might hold the messages in question were all recycled by 2012, and we do not have access to time travel.

        JW: Why haven’t you searched the government-wide backup system?

        IRS: Because that’s something you made up.

        1. “IRS: Here are the emails from the email servers and her desktop. ”

          or

          “Therefore, searching the servers would not result in the recovery of any information lost”

          Did they or didn’t they check the email servers? You and the IRS take conflicting positions on this.

          They didn’t even bother checking the email servers. Instead they pushed the story that each individual IRS employee uses their desktop hard drive to not only act as a backup for their communications on all devices but that all emails are routed through a desktop hard drive as an email server and that they don’t actually go through email servers.

          “Disaster recovery tapes were, until May 2013, subject to a
          six-month retention period”

          That doesn’t mean that only the last six months of data would be on those tapes. It means that all data stored on prior backups would be added to the new data collected and that this process happens every six months. Some IRS cases span years and they would need access to this information in the event of catastrophe.

          1. Did they or didn’t they check the email servers?

            Yes, and they handed over every message that they found that met the criteria of the subpoena. They also searched the hard drives of the employees in question, and handed over every message they found that way. That’s when they noticed that Lerner did not have emails on her hard drive for the period before June, 2011, due to the crash. So then they went and searched the accounts of “approximately 80 other employees for emails with Lemer’s name on the “to,” “from,” “cc,” or “bcc” lines. (8/11/14 Kane Deel., 1116-8.) That search located approximately 24,000 emails which predate Lerner’s hard drive crash. (Id.)”

            Instead they pushed the story that each individual IRS employee uses their desktop hard drive to not only act as a backup for their communications on all devices but that all emails are routed through a desktop hard drive as an email server and that they don’t actually go through email servers.

            No, the IRS has never claimed that. What they’ve stated, repeatedly, is that IRS employees had to use their desktop hard drives for overflow storage when they ran into server storage quota limits. The missing emails are emails that had been once been on the Exchange servers, but had been moved off the servers and onto her hard drive to make room:

            As a matter of internal IRS policy, an IRS employee’s centrally-managed Exchange Server Personal Storage Table (PST) (which includes, inter alia, the information contained in the employee’s email mailbox) is subject to a five hundred (500) megabyte (MB) size limitation, which translates to approximately six thousand (6,000) emails. As an employee’s centrally-managed Exchange Server PST approaches this file size limitation, a prompt is issued encouraging him or her to reduce the centrally-managed file size by archiving emails and attachments. Once archived, PST files are then solely in the possession and control of the IRS employee and are stored on the employee’s IRS-issued desktop computer, IRS-issued laptop computer, centrally-managed network share or peripheral device.

            It means that all data stored on prior backups would be added to the new data collected and that this process happens every six months.

            No, as the IRS wrote, the backups are snapshots of a point in time. Here’s what they wrote the court:

            Klimas explained that disaster recovery tapes, also referred to as backup tapes, take a snapshot of what appears in Service employees’ email mailboxes at a particular moment. (See id., Ex. 2 at 11.) Disaster recovery tapes do not, however, capture emails which are deleted or removed from employees’ mailboxes prior to the snapshot being taken. (See id.) Klimas further explained that, at the time of Lerner’s hard drive failure, disaster recovery tapes were scheduled to be overwritten or destroyed after six months.(See id.) Therefore, any tapes which contained snapshots of Lerner’s pre-crash email mailbox should have been overwritten or destroyed years ago.

            The tapes they have are snapshots of what was on the servers taken between late 2012 and May, 2013. The missing messages were moved off the servers prior to the hard disk crash in June, 2011.

    2. It’s funny how you always believe the IRS. You state their words as fact and call us bananas. Would you have done the same about Nixon?

      1. On the question of whether there is a government-wide backup system of all federal employee emails, the choices are to either believe the IRS or believe Judicial Watch. I believe the IRS. Which do you believe?

          1. How exactly would you investigate the purported existence of this government-wide backup system? How would you decide it was time to stop? There’s no proving a negative, you could look for it forever.

          2. Why are you so focused on a government wide backup system when the IRS didn’t even check its own back ups or email servers? Why do you continually believe the administrations lies?

          3. The imaginary government-wide backup system is a good window into the whole story. Nobody sane thinks it exists. Even you and the other commenters here won’t come out and say that they think it exists; instead you try to deflect the conversation in another direction. But the rightist media unquestioningly turns Judicial Watch’s press releases into article after article in support of a narrative that the IRS is lying or stonewalling and that there’s some great conspiracy afoot.

            In the recent election one of the local candidates for Register of Deeds made a number of arguments about how he would run the county records office better than his opponent. He also volunteered his opinion that Barack Obama is a regular heroin user. I don’t know enough about the right way to run a deed registry to evaluate the statements he made on that subject, but the heroin comment told me all I needed to know about him as a potential office holder. And it would have done so if the comment had been about Mitt Romney or Rand Paul as well — the informational value of the comment was in its craziness, not its target.

            Tom Fitton’s insistence that the government has a secret backup system saving the email messages of all federal employees is clarifying in the same way. If the rightist media was at all serious about the IRS story it would have long since asked Fitton to support his claim, or written him off as a untrustworthy source. The fact that they haven’t, and instead treat it as a scandal that the IRS refuses to search this imaginary backup system, tells you plenty about their ethics and credibility.

        2. I have had my Yahoo email account for 15 years. I can right now go into it and find any email I have sent or received for the past 15 years, or do a keyword search and find any particular email in seconds. And you’re a bald faced liar.

          1. What you can, and can’t do with your Yahoo! email account has no bearing on what the IRS can, and can’t do with IRS employee email accounts.

          2. Right, Jim, because the US Government doesn’t follow industry standards. And the IRS expects everyone to be able to find any of their records for at least 7 years, under threat of prison time. Yet they don’t retain records themselves? Even though their guidelines clearly state they have to make paper copies of all their emails? Liar.

          3. because the US Government doesn’t follow industry standards

            Microsoft Exchange is a pretty standard corporate email system. The fact that they A) didn’t set up their Exchange servers with enough storage to hold all their email, and B) didn’t have a backup system for desktop hard drives, strikes me as malpractice on the part of the IT administrators and/or the people who set their budgets.

        3. How about on the matter that the IRS didn’t even check its own backup tapes? Do you believe the IRS that they didn’t bother to check them? Do you believe the IRS claims that it also didn’t bother to check the email servers?

          1. Why would they check a backup tape made in late 2012 for a file that was removed from the server before June, 2011? What would be the point?

            the IRS claims that it also didn’t bother to check the email servers?

            The IRS handed over lots of emails from their servers.

    1. What I mean by “a negative” is a negative assertion, such as “the Loch Ness monster does not exist” or “there is no such thing as a unicorn”. You can fruitlessly look for unicorns for a thousand years and that wouldn’t prove that they don’t exist. You could have thousands of government officials go on the record denying that the federal government has a government-wide backup of all employee emails, but Tom Fitton could still say you just haven’t looked for it hard enough, and that the investigation should continue.

      1. I know what a negative is. You don’t think there is any evidence, and so you think we are searching for the Loch Ness Monster. I think we’ve already found evidence pointing to a cover-up (that’s a positive in this case), and so I think it is prudent to continue the investigation.

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