Eighteen Minutes? That’s Nothing. Try 28 MONTHS.

| June 14, 2014

The IRS announced yesterday that it had a bit of computer trouble recently.

Remember Lois Lerner? The former IRS senior executive who was accused of being at the center of a conspiracy to “slow roll” conservative groups’ applications for tax exempt status starting around 2010? And who invoked the 5th Amendment rather than testify to Congress about her role in that scandal?

Remember that the IRS Commissioner, John Koskinen, on 26 March of this year promised the House Ways and Means Committee that the IRS would deliver to that committee “every document the agency had which might be related to the scandal”?

Well, today the IRS said they would have a bit of a problem fulfilling that promise.  The IRS now says it’s missing a few of Lois Lerner’s e-mails to or from people outside the IRS.

How many? Well, all of them from January 2009 to April 2011.

Yes, you read that correctly. That’s all emails to or from Lerner to recipients/senders outside the IRS over a period of roughly 28 months.  A very critical 28 months, I might add, with respect to this particular scandal.

Do I need to remind anyone just how much business is conducted via email these days?  Or how much planning is conducted using same?  Email has essentially replaced the telephone and hardcopy correspondence as the principal form of business communications.  So yeah – this missing email is a “big (freaking) deal”.

During Watergate, eighteen minutes of one of critical tape was erased due to “technical issues” or “human error” (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).  Here, we have close two and a half years worth of email to outside correspondents that has been lost.  I’d guess that would be equivalent to somewhere around every fourth tape Nixon made being erased.

Sheesh. By comparison, Nixon and his cronies were pikers.  Hell, there were less than 28 months between the Watergate break-in and Nixon’s resignation.

The IRS says the lost email was due to a “computer crash”.  Uh-huh.  Sure.  Riiiight.  How . . . convenient.  Looks more to me like the Administration is telling us “it’s raining again” while p!ssing on our leg.

GMAFB.

Category: Legal, Politics

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mistythemedic

OMG. Such bullsh*t. Even a fifth-grader knows if your computer crashes it has NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on your email account. You can sign on to your email from anywhere you have access (CAC/PIV, NIPR/SIPR, whatever). Nice try, IRS. More lies and cover-ups for your crookeder-than-a-dog’s-hind-leg behavior.
Also it’s mid-June…I e-filed 31Jan, where’s my refund? Right, my return is still being processed…

TN

They lost your return when that computer crashed.

BTW: since they now have no record of your return, you are now considered to be a tax evader, until you prove that you are innocent of underpayment of taxes.

They’ll be in contact in a few years, to collect those taxes, fines, and interest accrued.

A Proud Infidel®

Have B.Hussein 0bama & Company been anything BUT a perpetual cornucopia of lies, scandals, malfeasance, opacity, incompetence, negligence, hypocrisy, criminal activity and nincompoopery since they first took the helm?

The Other Whitey

You forgot incompetence, buffoonery, shitbaggery, dishonesty, abuse of power, and possibly sexual impropriety involving dogs and/or goats.

SJ

So when I get an audit for reading, inter alia, TAH, I’ll be able to say that Quicken crashed and ate all my receipts?

Flagwaver

I actually have to agree with what was posted above. There is a difference between a computer crash and a server crash. Anyone who has worked the admin side of the house knows that emails are not held on the computer. All emails are held server-side and can be accessed on any computer with access and log-in. Additionally, there are redundancies and back-ups (at lease three in D.C.) should any such event occur.

This is just another notch in the incompetency excuse that the White House has decided to try. I’m surprised they didn’t just come out and say that the dog ate them.

Delilah T.

That should be ‘pikers’, Hondo.

And we all know that Tricky Dick and Haldeman and That Gang were just ordering pizza.

28 months, huh? Oh, don’t worry. It’s stored somewhere in a mainframe or a cloud and eventually, it will come to light because someone outside the perps involved will hack it.

Since when has it been impossible to run a recover on ‘missing’ stuff?

NEVER EVER.

Remember, boys and girls, de interwebbz izz FOREVAH!!!

Just an Old Dog

It’s going to take a long time to get rid of the rats that Barry infested the Government with.
Pray to God almighty that the Next President is not one of Obama, Kerry or Hillary ilk.
Nixon played dirty pool and was one nasty son of a bitch if you got on his bad side. Obama has minions who make Nixon look like a Saint.

AW1 Tim

More lies from President Mom-Jeans and his Clown Car Posse administration. Conveniently dumped on a Friday evening.

I’ve come to one conclusion, though. Obama is the President that Nixon wanted to be.

NHSparky

A website which I frequent was recently hit with a DDOS attack of 15GB/sec. Yup, you read that right. Someone wanted this site down, and cobbled together some serious resources to do it.

However, the site is back up and running, with all comments still intact. So you’re trying to tell me that a government that can find files on a supposedly “wiped” computer can’t do the same, but a couple of guys with decent IT skills can?

To quote Dana Carvey’s Church Lady, “Well, isn’t that convenient?”

DefendUSA

Tim- I put that on my FB last night!
“AYFKM?!!! Church lady????

Nina

So what they are saying is that A: the IRS servers ate only her emails to and from anyone internal to the IRS. B: Any other server that backs up emails of any other outside entity that she might’ve emailed ALSO ate her emails.

This is carrying the “dog ate my homework” scenario a wee bit too far

Oh – and if this was a private corporation – the owners of the company would be facing major jail time right now. Sarbannes-Oxley is just one of the laws out there that says shenanigans like this are a seriously HUGE prison-inducing mistake

UpNorth

Very true, Nina. However, with Eric the Red Holder in charge at Justice, the chances of anyone seeing the inside of a holding cell, much less a prison, is about 0.
This is just the Regime telling it’s subjects that they are royalty, and the rules don’t apply to royalty.

Matt 256

From the AP: “But an untold number are gone. Camp’s office said the missing emails are mainly ones to and from people outside the IRS,”such as the WHITE HOUSE, Treasury, JUSTICE, FEC.”
The White House, Justice…who would have thunk that?

Sparks

Hondo…Question. Doesn’t the IRS use something similar to the military’s AKO account cards to sign in and send/receive emails? If so, all of that should be on the backup servers. Every communication I made while a contractor with an AKO account was stored and backed up. If her’s are all gone, it seems to me it was a deliberate effort on someone’s part to erase them from all servers. Just a question and speculation without knowing IRS protocols.

Tom Huxton

I thought the hand had fallen off my B.S. meter, but it is just pegged deep into the red zone.
It is almost impossible to lose email. The sender copy, sender service copy, recipient service and recipient copy…….. intermediate server copies. I bet the NSA has copies in that big new billion terabit spy center.
Civilized countries would have been lopping heads by now.

Pineywoods NCO

BS Meter is broken because it hit the black category, which means it is way past Chevalier or Bernath or Wittengfield or all three and the other loons here put together…and now it is a black hole of bullshit of which the truth will never be found…

Oh hell, society’s fucked worse than a 7 pound cheeseblock right after arrival in the CSIR shop.

ArmyATC

Riiiiigghht. A “computer crash” that only effected Lerner’s e-mail. Yeah, I believe that. Is it just me, or does this entire administration look like a monkey fucking a football?

Delilah T.

Yes, and it’s not just you.

streetsweeper

I have swamp land in Arizona for sale too..

Roger in Republic

Right, all of her emails were lost in the fire at the records center. The fire is scheduled for this Sunday at 0300. We are very sorry that we are unable to comply with the congressional subpoena.

DefendUSA

As I know from experience…we have two servers. RAID. One goes down, the other has the ability to glean info. They are so full of shit, it should be drowning them. Absolute 100% horseshit.

gitarcarver

It should also be noted that this year, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told a House Committee that “the emails are archived.”

http://youtu.be/Ax6QGmKhRwo

In the past, I know that it in a lot of cases emails were kept locally on desk computers for convenience and to reduce strain on processing time for servers. But anytime something like an email passed through a server, it was archived.

In short, the IRS is full of it.

DefendUSA

Ace of Spades has a post up about Jason Chaffetz testifying that emails were archived.
The things that make you go hmmmm?!!!!

Delilah T.

Boys and girls, I know how much faith all of you have in the gubbmint to tell da troot.

But you should remember, while you’re piling up stuff that refutes the fudging and brown-nosing coming out of WDC, that somewhere, some placid unassuming soul is downloading that stuff to a hard drive, taking it home on discs, and waiting for that moment when it’s time for da spit to hit da fan.

Patience, my friends. Wait for the other side to start shooting.

ON a side note, some day, someone will be able to retrieve Nixon’s missing 18 minutes at the molecular level. Count on it. Then we’ll find out it was pepperoni pizza with extra cheese.

David

Not sure what the IRS uses for mail, but in my world every mail is stored on the company server,backed up real-time on another server, each desktop has its recent mails (both recipient and sender) and I think we have a redundant storage server as well. Then we have the e-mail archives on each individual desktop. If her computer crashed it would not affect all the other places… it COULD be long enough ago that the current server and the desktops concerned could all have exceeded the parameters for current storage – but no way in hell could every back-up be gone.

H1

So the IRS does not use Enterprise email?
Or, was Lerner using her personal email address for business?
I seem to remember some folks got caught doing just that somewhere in that time period.