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Lois Lerner attorney: She has no records of missing emails

Lois Lerner attorney: She has no records of missing emails

Lawyer: “It’s a little brazen to think she did this on purpose.”

The attorney for Lois Lerner is speaking out, saying that his client doesn’t have any records of the emails that were lost in a hard drive crash in 2011.

From Politico:

Lois Lerner has no records of two years of missing emails and Republican claims that she’s hiding something are “silly,” her lawyer said in his first interview since the controversy around the former IRS official erupted two weeks ago.

“She doesn’t know what happened,” lawyer William Taylor III said of the 2011 computer crash that erased two years worth of Lerner’s correspondence. “It’s a little brazen to think she did this on purpose.”

Taylor indicated that Lerner “requested that IT use every possible resource” to try and recover the contents of her hard drive.

Regardless of the misfortune of Lerner’s unrecoverable hard drive, many have asked if the emails were printed in hard copy anywhere as a backup. IRS rules specify in part that agency emails “created or received in the transaction of agency business” are to be printed and kept on file. IRS commissioner John Koskinen has said that not all emails are necessarily considered an “official record.”

Lerner’s attorney said she didn’t print the emails because she “did not think it was required,” according to Politico. Further, Taylor pushed that responsibility onto other staff.

“If somebody is supposed to keep archived copies, that’s the IT department’s or her staff’s responsibility,” he said. “If she didn’t [print] something, it wasn’t because she tried to conceal anything. … There should have been [IRS] backup.”

Taylor maintains that with respect to the targeting of conservative organizations, Lerner was just doing her job.

“After Citizens United, groups identifying themselves with the tea party and other, more conservative causes dramatically increased the number of applications for (c)(4) status,” he said, referring to the landmark Supreme Court ruling that significantly loosened restrictions on political spending.

He said it was simply the job of Lerner and the IRS to ensure such tax-exempt organizations follow the law, which bars them from using more than about half of their resources engaging in politics.

For Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp “to say the IRS is looking at political activity is like [Captain Renault] saying he’s shocked there’s gambling going on in ‘Casablanca,’” he said.

When POLITICO asked Taylor if Lerner was able to give an example where she expressed concern over a liberal group or lawmaker, he did not offer one.

Read the full interview at Politico.

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Comments

I believe she’s required by IRS internal procedures to keep hard copies? Deny her pension and she’ll come talking

    snopercod in reply to Frank G. | June 28, 2014 at 7:05 pm

    Deny her pension and she’ll come talking

    That would require a republican “leadership” with cojones…

    tobiathan in reply to Frank G. | June 28, 2014 at 8:41 pm

    The deeper the the stank gets in this situation the more i become convinced the both parties are corrupt to their core.

    If we haven’t seen enough outright criminality yet to justify indictments and arrests i fear that our government has finally become just another daytime soap opera.

    The lawlessness on display in today’s politics would have been enough to see resignations and and arrest en masse as recently as twenty years ago.

    Today these elected officials all just sit around kicking the ball down hill until election time after which the stalling begins anew.

    Wouldn’t it be great to see a REAL American government again?
    To

    aperture in reply to Frank G. | June 28, 2014 at 10:24 pm

    hey Ms. Lerner: orange is the new black

Lerner’s attorney ought to just shut up and let this play out. Based on the emails we have seen, she’s at about a -3 on the believability scale.

nordic_prince | June 28, 2014 at 7:05 pm

“It’s a little brazen to think she did this on purpose.”

It’s a little naive to think she didn’t.

If true, this is another pertinent fact withheld from the Oversight Committee by Koskinen, and another dereliction by the committee members in failing to draw it out.

Honestly, we’re still considering that the only copies of your email are on your hard drive?

There are no servers, no outlook, no archives, everything’s on the employee’s hard drive? Sure. Come on guys…

The IRS is an agency with approximately 100,000 employees and an annual IT budget of $1.8B. It would be reasonable to assume that each employee has a computer, and therefore that the IRS IT department is dealing with several hundred hard drive failures each year and replacing 20,000 to 30,000 computers each year. Consequently the IRS IT department must have a defective drive and obsolete computer stream and a process for handling said stream. The question is – How did the handling of Lois Lerner’s Hard Drive compare to the typical experience for these pieces of equipment? I just don’t believe that they destroy these things that fast (10 days), if in fact they are destroyed and not sent out for “reconditioning”.

    you got some of it right. There should be backups available. Email is normally done through a server, not just on local hard drive.

    These idiots seem to think that such a story is valid, but it is not.. the only people who would believe this story are those who are ignorant regarding how this all works.

      Midwest Rhino in reply to Aussie. | June 29, 2014 at 9:48 am

      the only people who would believe this story are those who are ignorant …

      But that is always the Obama plan (and I believe this is really an Obama story, as links to the White House are already clear) … to depend on Hollywood and media and his own “cool commie” persona, to persuade a majority of ignorant people that all his atrocities are “phony scandals”.

      With control of the executive and senate, it is left to the House to do something which would be ineffective and politically damaging. An occasional SCOTUS rebuke barely slows them down (though this one could bring him down, if handled properly).

      “Atrocities” may seem too strong, but the deliberate undoing of traditional America is indeed atrocious. Iraq was deliberately given away, after our victory. Borders are opened, patriots condemned. Open praise of Mao and Chavez by this administration go unchallenged.

      The list is long, but the ignorant seem to be a majority, thanks largely to decades of Hollywood, MSM, teacher unions, and DC centric entitlement policy.

      The silent majority may still be a little “conservative”, but too ignorant, as even churches are being “turned”, with the seditious “social justice”. Government forced “redistribution” promises are replacing free will localized Christian charity, and many ministers and the Pope seem on board the Obama train.

And as a Division Head, a big deal, she claims that ‘she didn’t know she was supposed to print them out’ ?

Are we to assume then that she never enforced that IRS policy in her division ?

Thus, the other 7 employees under who with ‘bad drives’ that week are off the hook, too ?

    Midwest Rhino in reply to pjm. | June 29, 2014 at 10:00 am

    and they had an immediately available backup for at least six months. What I heard was they claimed it was too expensive to retrieve the backups. (but not too expensive to keep running the backups) We need a real analysis of just how costly it really was, to retrieve the last six months. And when they conveniently fired the archiving company, what happened to all those archives? Did they burn all those too?

    So by law they must keep the info, and they had a company to specifically archive the data, and they fired them, and made a deliberate decision NOT to retrieve the legally required backups, because it was too expensive?

    It would be the first time in history a government agency decided to break a law, in order to save money. But Lois and others had big motive to take the fifth and bury evidence.

stevewhitemd | June 28, 2014 at 8:35 pm

IRS commissioner John Koskinen has said that not all emails are necessarily considered an “official record.”

Most certainly not the incriminating ones.

Impeach this man now.

    Radegunda in reply to stevewhitemd. | June 29, 2014 at 1:55 pm

    I recall some internal IRS communications to the effect that they needed to “do something” but it had to be done somewhat unofficially; they were obviously looking for a strategy to go after Tea Partiers et al. without having a defined policy to do it.

    That’s how they turn all the related communications into “not official records.”

so she only has comment via her own lying mouth or her Atty spokeshole when it helps her? I’m thinking that might not be the facts

Every email has a sender and recipient(s). Simply ask this [fill in the blank] government employee: who during those two years were you emailing regularly? Like, now. Like, yesterday. Ask the other employees under scrutiny who also experienced the same computer issue during — hmmm, isn’t it so strange — the same period: who were you emailing regularly?

Now if all those messages are “missing” it’s clear that these [fill in the blank] government employees are simply not incompetent and don’t know what happened.

We need an emergency court order to freeze and examine computers, backup drives, phones and so on. Right now. Otherwise, all evidence may be “lost.”

Doug Wright Old Grouchy | June 28, 2014 at 10:41 pm

I fail to understand why Issa, or Camp, doesn’t select a small set of IRS officials and make them an offer there shouldn’t be refused. That offer might consist of saying that the first one to come forward with credible information about the IRS’s wrongdoings, especially Lerner’s, will be granted full immunity from prosecution. The remainder can go fish!

Ok, so I’m not a lawyer, yet the concept just presented makes sense to me, so Rags, Prof. etc…, tell me what’s wrong with this concept and how it should be done.

The bottom line is that Congress needs to get off the dime and bring this scandal to a conclusion. Get it done and soon! Allowing this scandal to just drag on doesn’t do the country any good.

Juba Doobai! | June 29, 2014 at 12:04 am

The plan to stymie the investigation is working as conceived.

Anyway, I’m saying goodbye to the board. It’s time for me to sign off, sit down, and shut up. Wm, thank you for a great site. I will still be reading but not commenting. Rags, Uncle, Henry, Valerie, WhiteMD, and all the rest, y’all are the best. It’s been fun being part of the dialogue.

Over and out.

NC Mountain Girl | June 29, 2014 at 1:09 am

What’s brazen is to pretend this is anything other than obstruction of justice.

TrooperJohnSmith | June 29, 2014 at 1:58 am

I FIXT it:

“It’s a little brazen common sense to think she did this on purpose.”

Bruce Hayden | June 29, 2014 at 4:02 am

I actually find it credible that Lerner doesn’t have any of those emails, because it would likely be a crime if she did. Remember, she is retired. This means that if she had any relevant emails, it would mean that she had copied them probably illegally onto her home computer, smart phone, etc. And, if she were smart enough to crash her hard drive between the time Congress first put the IRS on notice of its interest in the scandal, and when it started asking for documents, she is likely smart enough to have long cleansed any home computers and the like of any incriminating evidence.

“She doesn’t know what happened,” lawyer William Taylor III said of the 2011 computer crash that erased two years worth of Lerner’s correspondence. “It’s a little brazen to think she did this on purpose.”

If she was “just doing her job” then she would absolutely request and receive the back up copies of all her “two years worth” of hard work ferreting out alleged ‘criminal’ Tea Party groups and…why plead the fifth?

Lawyer up Lois – the biggest job increase in this country since the reign of King Mack Daddy Obama and Obamacare will be legal workers and the deciphers of bullsh*t.

Typical Dem excuses: I have no records…there is no evidence of. Of course not, they all have been destroyed. Absent records or evidence of illegal activity is not proof it didn’t occur.

This “debate” about Lois Lerner destroying her emails, and archives, and back-ups is down right silly.

Do you really think Lois stayed late in her office combing through servers and archives, hunting down every last bit of data sent from her computer to destroy any and all records of intimidating evidence?

Do you really think it was even her idea?

That is, if you presume the data is even lost.

Has she reconstituted her email addressbook?

Fork it over, Lois. The recipients haven’t deleted all of their emails.