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IRS Lost Emails of 6 More Employees Under Investigation
phrackthat writes with an update to Friday's news that the IRS cannot locate two years worth of email from Lois Lerner, a central figure in the controversy surrounding the IRS's apparent targeting of Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny. Now, the IRS says there are another six workers for whom the agency cannot locate emails. As with Lerner, they attribute the unrecoverable emails to computer crashes.
Among them was Nikole Flax, who was chief of staff to Lerner’s boss, then-deputy commissioner Steven Miller. Miller later became acting IRS commissioner, but was forced to resign last year after the agency acknowledged that agents had improperly scrutinized tea party and other conservative groups when they applied for tax-exempt status. Documents have shown some liberal groups were also flagged. ... Lerner’s computer crashed in the summer of 2011, depriving investigators of many of her prior emails. Flax’s computer crashed in December 2011, Camp and Boustany said. The IRS said Friday that technicians went to great lengths trying to recover data from Lerner’s computer in 2011. In emails provided by the IRS, technicians said they sent the computer to a forensic lab run by the agency’s criminal investigations unit. But to no avail.
This is a massive conspiracy. The IRS is hopelessly corrupt. We need a special prosecutor and get people under oath. There needs to be a lot of jail time handed out, starting with the vile Lois Lerner.
an ill wind that blows no good
And throw away the key.
These are the kinds of people whom solidify in the mind of the protester the need for Violent Radicalization, and in the mind of the Patriot, the need for Terrorism and Civil War. That path invariably ends in sorrow; nearly every revolution and insurrection has resulted in the election of a despot. America is one of the very few historical example of a civil consequence of Revolution, and it's people very much so, despite it's governments best efforts, believe in a higher existence.
You can only "Nudge" people so far before they break (Yes I'm referencing this book: ISBN 978-0143115267, because so many policy makers think of it as a bible)
Also, the individual who asked or ordered them to do this; that person, jail.
Also, any organization which requested this, those people, charge with treason, then either publicly execute or jail.
Yes, of course they do. And they do regular backups. This story only flies with people who are not knowledgeable about computers in a business environment. Apparently the IRS thought there were enough of those that the people crying bullshit could be made to seem like right wing loonies.
But this isn't a right wing vs left wing issue -- whatever the current administration gets away with, will be fair game for the next administration, regardless of party.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I'm sure the NSA has copies. Perhaps someone should request them?
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
> Yes, of course they do. And they do regular backups. This story only flies with people who are not knowledgeable about computers in a business environment.
Actually, anyone who has handled email admin for a big business knows they have email "retention polices" where they explicitly delete all email older than X days (often just 90 days) except for what each user deliberately saves off. They do it to preemptively destroy evidence that might be used against them. But they never say that, they always have reasons that sound legitimate to the credulous, like lack of resources or being appropriate to the business culture, etc. They also routinely over-write or discard the backup-tapes as part of that retention policy because that would defeat the purpose if they didn't.
I can totally believe that some chucklehead IT manager with experience in that sort of environment decided to implement the same polices for the IRS because it is an industry "best practice."
Can't they subpoena data from everyone else at the IRS who sent or received emails from the employees under investigation?
By it's very nature, there are always 2 copies of every email, one on the sender's PC and one on the receiver's PC.
Of course they do. This is just someone trying very hard to cover their arse.
Simple (unrealistic) proposal for a new law: for every employee under investigation the IRS has "lost emails" for, American taxpayers get a free year to use the excuse, "Oops, I just lost the financial documents for my audit" without any punishment, fines, or further questioning. By my reckoning, we all should have absolute defenses against tax audits until 2021 so far.
That will stop this nonsense fast.
Government is also slow on the technology pickup. The university back home still only keeps emails up to 1 year on their servers (citing space issues) and tells teachers and staff to archive emails if they want them longer. Typically, email hasn't been a "must keep a record of this" on the list of documents you save. The only reason they still have the computers that crashed is probably due to a requirement that they be properly disposed of to avoid leaking out sensitive data, and they just didn't get around to disposing of them.
Fine, sure 3 computers crashed, they were probably way out dated and many computer equipment isn't built to last. How many computers did they retrieve emails from? What percentage of these 3 is of the total?
When you make the rules, you are right when you're wrong.
OK a new size TV
Tons of libs targeted too.
Name one.
As far as I know, the only "liberal" groups that were targeted were liberal groups that were also against the current administration. Pro-Democrat Party groups, on the other hand, were not targeted.
This is absolutely a political issue and a gross overstepping of power on behalf of the current administration and they absolutely should be investigated for it.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
What about where the emails were sent? The emails that were "lost" were sent to the White House, the Department of Justice (Lerner sent other emails that we know of trying to coordinate with DOJ to try to drum up prosecutions of Tea Party groups) and the FEC to try to target any alleged political speech. Each of these departments should have independent backups and records on each of the recipient's computers.
A member of the House has already sent a request to the NSA for any metadata it may have on Lerner's emails. Hopefully this will help track down any "lost" emails and who the recipients were.
Sorry to repeat myself, but this was a late post to the first incarnation of this story.
Sharyl Attkisson (investigative reporter formerly with CBS) has posted some questions that should be asked:
Senators and Representatives blow like the leaves during elections, but our federal institutions persist. Their executive personnel may turn over, but the organization doesn't.
You can have as many Senate hearings and bluster on CSPAN as you like, possibly even terminate and reappoint senior level officials, but the organizational mission of the NSA & CIA is skullfuckery, treachery and manipulation, and the IRS exists to refill the wallet of the federal government every way imaginable.
What will come of this? Well, a probe into data archiving pract Oh look a tornado just wiped out a town out West and one of the Kardashians is pregnant again. Just a sec, gotta look at Reddit on my iPhone. What were you saying?
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
There are specific Fed regs for email. In fact, a hard copy is required. This is a blatant sham.
Nice BS AC. Try again. The IRS Inspector General's office stated in a letter that only 6 groups with “progress” or “progressive” in their names were given any scrutiny at all for potential political activity, while 70 percent of “progressive” groups received no additional scrutiny. The letter continued, “In comparison, 100 percent of the tax-exempt applications with Tea Party, Patriots, or 9/12 in their names were processed as potential political cases” and subjected to intrusive scrutiny. Finally, the letter concluded that it “did not find evidence that the IRS used [the term “Progressive”] as selection criteria for potential political cases.”
Further, all of the leftist political groups received their approval very quickly whereas most of the tea part groups have waited years and still haven't received approval of their applications! The reason why "repubs" are still "fucking this dead story" is because it isn't dead you brain-dead fucktard. Nixon merely wanted to use the IRS to oppress his political opponents but was denied - Obama fucking succeeded!
Thats the point
2 years is a ridiculously short time to "age out" email archives. Especially for an agency that takes longer than that to handle basic interactions. I just got a call last month from the IRS regarding the estate of a relative who passed in 2011. And the IRS claims they have the authority to go back six years for substantial errors so I'd expect them to be keeping their emails at least that long. More realistically, I'd expect them to keep their emails indefinitely. Storage is getting cheaper faster than email accumulates. What does the average person accumulate in a decade? 5 gigs? IRS has around 90,000 employees so that's 450,000 gigs of data give or take. Shit, I've got 32,000 gigs of storage 2' from me. I could expand that to 78,000 by swapping in bigger hard drives. And 144,000 by swapping in bigger drives and adding more ports. That's with stuff I could order from Newegg and assemble on the dining room table. If I went with real equipment, the only limit would be my wallet.
Last company I worked for, had been archiving email for years before I started and hadn't thrown out (or lost) a single email when I left 5 years later. If legal needed something from 2005, they'd give me the particulars and I'd plug them in and the system spit out a compilation of every message that met the specs. I also made an image of every employee's hard drive when they left the company before I put a fresh image on their computer. Just in case they'd stored something important on their local drive instead of their department's server. Only needed that a few times but the cost was so negligible we spent more on donuts and bagels than storing drive images.
Their failure to have a redundant, secure archive of such recent email is either intentional destruction or gross incompetence.
wow, the IRS thing is awesomely ridiculous. All the people under investigation have had computer crashes that prevent their emails from being delivered to the prosecutors. What are the odds?
I can see it now...
Prosecutor: "Give us the emails for Lerner!"
IRS: "Uh, sorry, computer crashed, lost his data".
P: "Really? Well, umm...I guess that is possible. How about chief-of-staff Flax? I need his emails too"
I: "Computer crashed; what a coincidence. We lost his data too."
P: "Hmm, well I got four more suspects..."
I: "Yeah, uh, let me see that list. Okay, computer crashed, computer crashed, computer caught fire, exploded, THEN crashed and... oh, you're in luck with the last one!"
P: "Are you telling me it didn't crash?"
I: "No, isn't that great? Too bad the computer was accidentally was destroyed in a bizarre pet hippopotamus incident. But don't worry, hippos are now banned from all IRS offices."
Yes, the IRS still runs Windows XP. Their systems are an archaic cluster of crap. Remember, the IRS just collects the money but doesn't get to keep it and spend it on upgrades. Only police departments and judges can do that using forfeiture laws.
They employ 90k people. You're thinking the loss of 7 people's email accounts is "lots"?
Sorry. My bad. I run Linux, Unix and Mac systems. I forgot all about the poor fools stuck with Windows.
Have gnu, will travel.
I guess you stopped paying attention to this story quite a while ago, which is understandable. They only made that argument for a week or two. They have since admitted wrong-doing, first blaming it on a field office, but later documents showed to orders came from Washington. I don't recall the EXACT numbers offhand, but something like 342 conservative groups were targeted and 4 liberal groups ended up being sent over in the stack. It has now been shown conclusively that the order was to target conservative and libertarian groups. The question now is who gave the order. Nobody active in politics on the left brings up the few liberal groups who got mixed in the the conservatives and libertarians anymore - they know that's not just a losing argument, but one that makes them look like liars when the numbers are mentioned.
Well if you read any of the articles you'd note that what was missing in the original story was any email prior to 2011 due to the computer of the employee involved crashing in the summer of that year.
"The IRS was able to generate 24,000 Lerner emails from the 2009 to 2011 because Lerner had copied in other IRS employees. The agency said it pieced together the emails from the computers of 82 other IRS employees."
The IRS said in a statement that more than 250 IRS employees have been working to assist congressional investigations, spending nearly $10 million to produce more than 750,000 documents.
Overall, the IRS said it is producing a total of 67,000 emails to and from Lerner, covering the period from 2009 to 2013.
This is going to be "email of the gaps" because the Republicans are just desperate for a scandal they pin on Obama and gosh darnit Benghazi just isn't sticking!
and flagged more progressive groups for review
"Review" meant a very different thing for groups that had things like "Tea Party" in their name, such as intrusive demands for information on participants and not actually approving any such groups for 27 months.
In February 2010, the Champaign Tea Party in Illinois received approval of its tax-exempt status from the IRS in 90 days, no questions asked.
That was the month before the Internal Revenue Service started singling out Tea Party groups for special treatment. There wouldn't be another Tea Party application approved for 27 months.
In that time, the IRS approved perhaps dozens of applications from similar liberal and progressive groups, a USA TODAY review of IRS data shows.
Your talking points are obsolete.
From Article II of the Nixon Articles of Impeachment:
And a few bullet points later, using the machinery of government to corrupt investigations.
I knew this whole thing stunk when she plead the 5th -- either she had crimes to hide, or she was innocent and deciding "not to participate in their political game", said use of the 5th thus being a crime itself.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
If 7 is the entire sample size, that means 100% of the emails they've been looking for have been missing.
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