48 thoughts on “Hey, Remember Those “Missing” Emails?”

  1. Ha! I wonder what our resident trolls will have to say? Well, if the President doesn’t want to give them over, he just has to write an order saying that, right?

      1. And the fact that these and those “Fast and Furious” documents were released just after the elections is just a coincidence, I’m sure.

        In a pig’s eye!

          1. So Obama never blamed Benghazi on a youtube video and the requests for extra security were never denied? Oh wait the report says those things happened.

          2. The report found mistakes in security preparations before the attack, and in the process of preparing the talking points, but no intelligence failure, no stand-down order, and no cover-up. No scandal. And this is the conclusion of House Republicans.

          3. The report found mistakes in security preparations before the attack, and in the process of preparing the talking points, but no intelligence failure, no stand-down order, and no cover-up.

            These things don’t go together.

          4. Of course they do. You have to be truly paranoid to believe that all mistakes are part of intentional cover-ups.

          5. and no cover-up

            Jim, speaking of cover ups, you have an opinion (from the next Transterrestrial post on how come considerable Fast and Furious-related documentation provided by the DOJ in response to a FOIA request by Judicial Watch contains exactly one misspelled reference to Sharyl Attkisson (the reporter who was aggressively pursuing Fast and Furious at the time)? Seems like someone broke the FOIA law by deleting all references to Attkisson.

          6. I haven’t followed that story closely enough to know what documents were requested by Judicial Watch, i.e. what search terms the DOJ was supposed to use to select the documents to turn over. That one email thread is no “bombshell” — it shows press officers doing what press officers do.

          7. I may be paranoid, but that doesn’t mean bureaucrats that try to cover their asses. There were problems with presenting the talking points but no intelligence failure? That’s BS. The talking points contained intelligence that was never generated from the place of the attack. Further, that intelligence “the attack started from a video protest” has been shown to be incorrect. These are failures.

          8. “The report found mistakes in security preparations before the attack,”

            Repeated denials for extra security in a country Obama just helped Islamic militants overthrow the government. Failure to take appropriate action after all the other Westerners in the city were attacked.

            “and in the process of preparing the talking points”

            Where the White House altered the talking points to gruber people away from what really happened, blamed what happened on a Youtube video, and scapegoated then imprisoned the maker of that video.

            “no stand-down order”

            This is a bit pedantic. People were told to stand down, ordered to, but there was not a “Stand Down Order”. It is a bit like standing at a crosswalk and the little white walking dude lights up but a cop tells you not to cross the street. You are free to walk because the little red dude wasn’t lit up right? No, because the cop said stay put even though the official don’t walk sign was not lit up.

            “and no cover-up”

            Obama’s debate performance and everything the administration said in the aftermath shows that there indeed was a cover up.

            “No scandal”

            Pretty big scandal but then again you think Obama was doing the right thing by persecuting political dissidents and intimidating reporters like he was head of the KGB.

  2. Those can’t be real. I received every assurance that they were gone forever in numerous comment threads on this very blog!

    1. And you were also assured – right here in this blog – that the IRS did everything possible to produce them and that it’s a waste of time to go looking for them.

      1. Nobody claimed that the IRS had done “everything possible”, and it remains to be seen whether the effort taken to search the backup tapes will yield anything of interest.

        1. “Nobody claimed that the IRS had done “everything possible””

          The Obama administration did. The repeatedly told the courts that they looked everywhere for the missing emails. They also claimed they provided all of the emails without notifying the court that years of them were missing.

          1. “Then who did notify the Congress that emails were missing? ”

            Years after they claimed to have provided everything…

    2. And you were assured that if any of these emails actually existed they would have already been turned over the first time they were asked for because the Obama administration is totally honest and not engaged in a cover up.

          1. By all means show me where the IRS claimed to have searched the server backup tapes; a link to an IRS statement will do.

          2. Are you seriously trying to say that the IRS didn’t claim to have provided all of the emails and that they had searched everywhere for them?

          3. Are you seriously trying to say that the IRS didn’t claim to have provided all of the emails and that they had searched everywhere for them?

            Yes, that’s what I’m saying. To prove me wrong all you have to do is post a link to the IRS’s claim that they had provided all the emails and had searched everywhere for them. Well?

          1. I didn’t say there was nothing there, I said that the backups of Lerner’s server mailboxes wouldn’t have messages that she moved off the server a year and a half before the backups were made (i.e. the messages that were lost when her hard disk crashed). And there’s no reason to believe they do.

            The server backups should contain copies of messages that Lerner sent to other IRS employees before June 2011, and which those employees happened to delete from the server between December 2012 and May 2013. There’s no particular reason to believe that those messages will be more revealing than the tens of thousands of other emails that have already been turned over, but hope for a real Obama scandal springs eternal in the GOP.

          2. It’s an irrelevant point Jim. The IRS failed to conduct a search, because they said it wasn’t worth the effort and they didn’t think anything was recoverable. As you do, you parroted the lie here many times.

            The argument that the IRS admitted to not looking at the tapes just shows contempt, not honesty.

          3. They said that the backups of Lerner’s server mailbox made after December 2012 wouldn’t have messages that she moved off the server before the hard disk crash in 2011, and there’s no evidence that they do.

  3. This is about the time Jim drops all the BS excuses and goes with the they deserved what happened to them defense.

    1. Give him time. He’s probably busy right now frantically cruising the Left blogosphere and joptting down the prescribed talking points and finding out what the party line is on this. Once Baghdad Jim gets his marching orders, be checking in here.

  4. Rand should make a “Jim bot” that follows the usual script and auto-posts on Jim’s behalf. We surely have enough samples the script could use to give a little variety. But I still believe Jim’s an Eliza-based AI that escaped MIT in a Zork distribution back in the 80’s, so I won’t be fooled.

    1. ” But I still believe Jim’s an Eliza-based AI that escaped MIT in a Zork distribution back in the 80’s,”

      Funny, but no. He’s a liar. Period.

  5. It isn’t exactly clear what they’ve found — the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), the office examining the tapes*, hasn’t said whether they’ve found any emails that weren’t previously turned over. If they did, I’m guessing that something like this happened:

    * The email was sent by Lois Lerner to another IRS employee
    * Lerner either deleted her copy or moved it to her desktop hard drive before the hard drive crash in June, 2011
    * The recipient kept the email in their server mailbox until at least December 2012
    * Sometime between December 2012 and May 2013 the recipient deleted the message

    Such a message wouldn’t have been found when the IRS went through Lerner’s server and desktop mailboxes in early 2013, and it wouldn’t have been found when they went through the recipient’s mailboxes either. But it would be recoverable from a backup of the recipient’s server mailbox made between December 2012 and whenever it was deleted from the server (backup tapes older than that had been recycled).

    If my guess is right, this will give investigators more messages to look at, but unless every message Lerner sent before the hard disk crash was retained by an IRS employee until December 2012 it won’t recover everything. This is no substitute for Tom Fitton’s imaginary government-wide email archive.

    * When Judicial Watch recently complained that the IRS hadn’t searched the backup tapes, the IRS reply indicated that the tapes were in the possession of TIGTA, and therefore unavailable to the IRS.

  6. Of course they do. You have to be truly paranoid to believe that all mistakes are part of intentional cover-ups.

    If suspicion (rather than paranoia) is properly executed, it will reveal many things. You wouldn’t call Woodward paranoid, would you?

    1. At this point there have been eight official investigations of Benghazi, and even the Republicans on the House Intelligence committee say that there was no cover-up or intent to mislead the public. Watergate comparisons are lazy; when Woodward started reporting on Watergate conspirators had already been arrested. Benghazi is a cautionary tale of how a political party and its media arm can spend two years misleading its base and using dead Americans as political props, before quietly admitting on a Friday evening that there was none of their hysterical accusations were true.

      1. I see, there wasn’t anything worth investigating so we shouldn’t have lifted a finger. Your party is so squeaky clean that we should just merely trust everything you say.

        No thanks.

  7. Jim: I think the Obama administration is the least corrupt in my lifetime (and the number of high-level criminal prosecutions bears that out). I’m proud of having volunteered for the campaign.

    Still boggling.

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