Darrell Issa: It’s Hard to Believe Lois Lerner Doesn’t Have Copies of Emails
“She knew under the Federal Records Act that she had an obligation for these documents to be preserved.”
Darrell Issa, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, appeared on CNN today and was asked about Lois Lerner’s missing emails by host Candy Crowley.
He’s clearly not buying the official story and he ultimately makes an excellent point about the heart of the issue, that under Lerner, conservative groups were targeted for their beliefs.
Andrew Johnson of National Review sets the scene:
House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa finds it very implausible that Lois Lerner didn’t keep copies of her emails that are now missing. Under the Federal Records Act, Lerner, a longtime IRS employee, would know that she is required by law to preserve those emails.
“To not have print-to-paper, which is the policy that she had to know, is pretty hard to believe,” the California Republican said on State of the Union. “Do I believe that she printed to paper? Yes, she’s an attorney of longstanding and it’s kind of hard to believe that you wouldn’t cover with your own paper copies.”
Here’s the video:
Is it just me or does it seem like Candy Crowley is going a little out of her way to suggest Lerner’s story is believable?
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If no copies of her emails to outside agencies exist on any government server or backup media, it is only because someone deliberately deleted them as incriminating.
And it is not so easy to cover the tracks of such a deletion, unless the NSA itself was called in.
The FIRST time those documents were not forthcoming Issa SHOULD HAVE quickly gotten a subpoena and gone in with federal Marshals and taken them!
END OF STORY! And should have definitely done it after Lois Lerner took the 5th the FIRST time!
This is the IRS–the most powerful agency ever–and we are hink dinking around with PHONY wait a year before the next non compliance occurs!
How he should have responsed: “Yes Candy, it is possible that Lerner’s hard drive and the hard drives of six others crashed 10 days after being notified that they would be investigated, and that no network or hardcopy backups exist in contradiction to federal law. It is also possible that as I sit here talking to you a meteorite will drop from the sky and strike me dead. I’d venture a guess that the odds are about the same for both possibilities.”
The odds of a hard drive failure are apparently exponentially proportional to how incriminating the contents of the hard drive are.
I think it was Iowahawk who first wrote: “Apparently, the leading cause of hard drive failures is subpoenas.”
Hit the wrong reply button the first time around…
THEN THOSE EMAIL ARE GONE FOREVER!!!
Everything that happens that is illegal or un-Constitutional COME DIRECTLY FROM THE OVAL OFFICE, PERIOD! Government workers just DON’T pull this stuff off WITHOUT ORDERS FROM SOMEONE AND THEY ALL ARE BEING DIRECTED BY THE OVAL OFFICE weather it’s the IRS emails or the VA secret waiting lists–the orders come from the OO!
We are NOT that stupid! If things are going to be revealed Obozo want’s it to be AFTER he leaves office! He doesn’t realize that that won’t make any difference as the statutes of limitation on most of this stuff doesn’t run out for years and years!!! They can all be held accountable!!
Did Candy Crowley not openly jump in front of Barack Obama during the second presidential debate, taking Obama’s part and blocking Mitt Romney when it appeared there was nothing in front of Mitt Romney but open field and touchdown against Barack Obama?
I think it was Iowahawk who first wrote: “Apparently, the leading cause of hard drive failures is subpoenas.”
Candy Crowley would probably sell her soul (if she hasn’t already) to ensure that Obama and the Democrats are not lying.
She is a disgrace.
*assure
remember when obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence were federal crimes rigorously investigated by the FBI and prosecuted by the DOJ?
back when the US was a first world country under the rule of law…
Don’t be silly. What you mean is, “back when it was a Republican scandal”.
Over at Truth Revolt there is a clip from Z Street claiming that they had put the IRS under an obligation to preserve such things years ago. In other words, it’s a felony.
All official records have been REQUIRED to be preserved since the ’80s – it was a response to Ollie North shredding documents (which were NOT under subpoena at the time). Records can ONLY be destroyed with specific permission from the Archivist.
The idea that IRS just never complied doesn’t pass the laugh test.
But even if we assume IRS adopted a non-compliant system for over 25 years, it still defies imagination that ALL SEVEN hard drives of those who emails were involved with the targeting of conservative/Republican/Tea Party groups crashed AT THE SAME TIME, and AFTER notice those records would be sought was made to the IRS.
Even that fat gal from 2008 who believed Obama would pay her car payments wouldn’t believe that crap.
Can we give Richard Nixon his presidency back? Clearly the gap is the tape was no big deal.
I’d like to say its hard to believe the GOP has not gone after the server techs to trace the emails….but its not hard to believe.
if they really wanted them thats where they would go.
Congress moves incredibly slowly. It is entirely possible they will go after the IT people … someday. If they get to it this year, it will be – for congress – a blindingly fast move.
Sigh
It is just possible that they are, behind the scenes. Not every aspect of every investigation is announced publicly.
For instance, Issa may have some advice from career prosecutor Trey Gowdy (who is chairing the Select Committee on Benghazi) to discreetly subpoena those lower level employees and depose them privately, eschewing public hearings until he knows what they have to say.
Among the things Lois Lerner’s deleted emails would have revealed:
— she turned over Mitt Romney’s tax returns to Harry Reid
— she snooped through Rush Limbaugh’s returns (Hugh Hewitt didn’t rate)
— she ransacked the Koch Industries returns
— she combed through Scott Walker’s campaign records and files
Hey Ms. Lerner: find the emails and you can sue me for libel.
One more point when we’re talking odds and meteorites: what are the odds that an IRS supervisory lawyer would NOT know the protocol for filing and storing emails?
ALL agencies are subject to the National Records Act, and she was previously at the Federal Election Commission (also targeting Republicans, coincidentally). Did BOTH agencies systematically ignore the law?
Whether Lerner has copies of the emails or not is irrelevant. The hard drive is a red herring. Those emails MUST exist either on an email server or in a backup and that’s where any competent IT person (speaking from my own IT experience) would start the search for them.
I really hope that Lerner doesn’t have any of those emails, because if she did, she would likely be guilty of a/(another) federal crime. What everyone is forgetting is that she is retired, and to have them would likely mean that she retained IRS records, and, likely confidential taxpayer information, that shouldn’t have gone home with her in the first place.
This is not the computer whose disk drive supposedly crashed so conveniently. She gave that up when she retired. To have IRS emails at this point would mean that they are on her home computer, laptop, etc. And, that is not that probable.
This re-affirms to me the sad fact that the IRS is a federal agency.
It’s clearly an arm of the Democrat party, it’s workers bluer-than-blue from janitor to the highest level of their administration.
The ‘hard drive’ excuse is laughable, primitive email servicers like NetZero keep the stuff on servers, does anyone think the imperious miss Lerner didn’t have her secretary do the typing, she doesn’t look like they type who could be bothered booting up her own machine. If he could, Issa should send in troops and seize the servers…
This re-affirms to me the sad fact that the IRS is (not really) a federal agency.
I wish there was a capacity to edit these posts, even if for a few minutes….
Everyone know that Lois Lerner and everyone around her has committed perjury about her “lost” emails. IRS email shouldn’t be different then any other government agency email. It can be accessed from ANY workstation within that government agency. Enter username, userpassword, or insert PIV (or CAC) card and enter pin, then pull up email and anything else you need. So, if an enterprising TV reporter actually wanted to- he/she could take a camera crew into any IRS office, and film an IRS employee accessing official agency email from two different workstations. Not possible if email were stored on “C:” drive. One of these brilliant senators representing us should have already thought of doing this. Of course, if a Republican did it, then the news media wouldn’t cover it. No, wait- they would probably race to their microphones to see who could be first in calling it a cheap Republican stunt.
Their story goes like this: each employee only gets 500 MB of storage on the email server. Laughable with modern data capacities, true, but that is what they say.
Once their space is exceeded, the emails are backed up to tape and to the local hard drive of the employee. Then, because tape is ‘spensive ‘n’ all, they only keep the tapes for six months and then “recycle” them in violation of federal law, leaving the hard drive as the only remaining copy, even though the law also requires a printed hard copy of each record be kept separately.
Now, it should be noted that by 2011, both IBM and Fujifilm had developed tapes with an individual capacity of 35 TERABYTES – more than 7000 times the maximum data IRS claims it kept on tape before reuse.
Not at all plausible, but that is what they want us to believe.
I can’t believe I am going to udder these words but… here goes anyway.
Candy Crowley should move to India where she would be a protected class and dare I say worshiped!
Oh please forgive me!