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IRS Recycled Lerner Hard Drive
phrackthat (2602661) writes The Senate Finance Committee has been informed that the IRS recycled the hard drive of Lois Lerner, which will deprive investigators of the ability to forensically retrieve emails which were supposedly deleted or lost in a "crash." This news comes after the IRS revealed that it had lost the emails of Lois Lerner and six other employees who were being investigated regarding the targeting of conservative groups and donors.
/. is really going downhill....
More people need to go to prison for "white collar" crimes. The brash disregard of the law has turned into an epidemic because everybody with an ounce of clout is let off the hook with a slap on the wrist.
I guess the backup tapes were recycled as well? Perhaps the IT staff should be charged with Obstruction of Justice?
A conversation about destroying evidence constitutes a conspiracy.
The politicization of the IRS should be the biggest scandal ever. How many other institutions are being used to pursue a political agenda instead of their true function?
They targeted groups for their anti-IRS activities, not because of their conservative politics. That is a typical Tea Party spin of this story. Even if they were targeting conservatives, it wouldn't be any less fair than the FBI/NSA targeting liberals, which it did for decades.
yeah, that's right, the Do you think I'm stupid? look.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I'd go to jail for this act, likely I'd get charged with obstructing justice, destroying evidence etc. Will we see these charges brought about to members of the IRS staff?
what kind of DR plan does the IRS have?
See this is where the news gets varying degrees of surreal.
In 2014, you "recycled" a hard drive with important emails on it?! Really?!
So then we're faced with that famous Dr. Who trick of whether the Media is accurately reporting an astoundingly senseless event, or if the Media got it wrong.
Oh look, this time it's the IRS. What's with agencies magically losing data when it suits them? Snark aside and all that, why is it that only HIPAA medical records get taken remotely seriously at least with lip service? What possibly produces a result like "ho hum, let's recycle this person's hard drive and damn any data that happens to be there in the only copy with no backup?!"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
We lost the backups. Her computer drive was taken apart and recycled into a crib mobile for underprivileged infants. We had printouts but those were shredded into organic compost. The tape backups were overwritten as we only have one backup set of tapes. The people who sent her the email also deleted them from their "sent" boxes as they only have 5MB of quota for that mail box. The people who received her email deleted them from their inboxes as we rigorously practice inbox zero.
So you see, no monkey business here.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Did they recycle the lost e-mails also? I hate to just throw away those electrons, better to recycle them.
These groups specifically feel that "taxation is slavery", and tried to circumvent tax law by claiming educational organization status.
To NOT target them for further scrutiny would have been a bigger scandal.
your health records when they can't even keep your tax data??
Why the hell aren't these people slapped with an obstruction of justice fine??
Yeah, this site is now a liberal echo chamber. But don't worry, soon Obama will bail them out.
They targeted likely opponents of the Obama administration in an attempt to impede the flow of funds to their opponents. It is a clear politicization of a department of the government that shouldn't be politicized. Any other interpretation of this is spin.
Her hard drive crashed 3 years ago, she lost her pst file that was kept on her local hard drive (a bad but common practice). IT shredded the ruined drive, or a more likely event, it was turned into the manufacturer for a replacement drive because it was still under warranty.
No great conspiracy, just basic IT stuff.
Don't don't things become unusable because of all the damaged sectors?
This is a clear cut case. Records will show abnormal handling of data. Duh
An acquaintance of mine is a senior guy in Chicago's IRS office. He does large corporate audits, which means he's sitting across from guys in $2000 suits all day. The laptop he was carrying until late 2012 had a Windows 2000 license sticker on it and his "new" government-issued laptop is an HP that was manufactured in 2004. These guys really do make more with less and I have no trouble believing that the equipment Lerner was using was painfully obsolete and used until it died.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
At this point, it's hard to take seriously any of the right wing complaints against Obama. Even if a particular one might be justified, there has been so much fake outrage from them that they just look like clowns.
We're approaching a "The Reichstag Burned Down" moment in America.
Who cares about a computer hard drive, what about the mail server? Surely her mail is archived by exchange or something. I mean, corporate email has to be archived for what, 5-7 years or something? Delicious bacon forbid that a business doesn't backup it's communications. Even IMs are archived via corporate email these days, via Office Communicator or it's successor. Sure, her local PST files are probably lost with drive erasure, but the server archive has to be there. If not, someone needs to be going to prison, and I can guarantee the IT ppl are going to point fingers in the proper direction, they aren't going to take the fall.
If anything can make me believe in God, it is all of this. You have no choice but to believe in a God when you have been shown proof of an anti-christ. We have a leader that is beyond crooked and has crossed the line to evil.
Well good people, now is the time to send a request over to NSA so that we (American people) can get the meta data by and between the entire IRS the whomever "they" have been talking to on this matter (and what else?).
Sure it will not directly yield the content of the messages (or so they say) but it can point to someone else you has a an electronic copy of these "lost" emails - like government computer.
How convenient this is -- Everyone concerned in this charade needs to go to prison, including that fool in the WH
Nixon attempted to get the IRS to focus on certain enemies, and was rebuffed, because the IRS director wanted no part of that corruption.
I think this administration is worse than Nixon's, and will cause more long-term harm to the office of the presidency. Not so much for the NSA scandal, which is only a result of Obama continuing on the curve begun many administrations ago... but for this scandal and the abuse of executive decree, fundamentally breaking the roles and separation of powers in our government.
Seriously, the western world needs to implement a comprehensive leftist elimination program. All those vermin and parasites are good for is sucking the life out of people that are actually trying to do something useful. I don't care who replaces them. Conservatives, libertarians, monarchists or nazis, anything would be an improvement. I don't care if they need to be run out of the country at the ends of bayonets, tossed in jail or shot, just Get. Rid. Of. Them! You'll know we'll really have change we can believe in when we can look out of our windows and see an Enlightened(TM) corpse swinging from every lamppost.
post to undo bad mod
but his dog ate all of the bits, too.
CAP = 'record', but is it "record" or "record"...
They should just contact the NSA. I'm sure they've got copies.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
No backup of the email server either? Hmm...
It's either this, or Benghazi, or Obama's birth certificate. All of which, we're told, are conspiracies worse than Watergate.
The politicization of the IRS should be the biggest scandal ever. How many other institutions are being used to pursue a political agenda instead of their true function?
We'll, under President Bush the DOJ first started to heavily pursue a political agenda http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/01/13/59600/internal-probe-slams-bush-justice.html including making sure new-hires possessed approved political opinions. And that's far scarier than the IRS becoming politicized.
It is a conspiracy that's what's being investigated!
This is not just a political animal (i.e. an elected administration), this is the company in charge of tax records who is in non-compliance with the Federal law it enforces.
Or (more likely) the actual conspiracy has more connections, enough that someone is covering them up.
I am still laughing at all this because people forget to go back to the basics and remember that this is government/corporate and not your home mailbox. This is not Google's mail where it was revolutionary when they offered unlimited storage space. This isn't a technology company that treasures email communication like gold. This is a place that still is operating under late 90s/early 00s rules.
1) Storage is expensive - so (assuming) that they are running Exchange and somewhat recent (2003 - switching to 2007 would have taken too long when everything is working fine and made more sense to wait to 2010), they don't have a lot of storage space on the back end. Yes, I know you're bragging about terabyte drives and the like but the equipment on the back end is going to be circa 2005 and enterprise storage would be sitting around 72gb or 144gb SCSI, or maybe a NetApp or EMC device to allow clustering but it will still be limited.
2) Mail box sizes are going to be dictated by that same ancient policy - which means that they are going to be set at something like 100 MB or maybe even 250 MB. If they were *really* progressive, they'll be at 500 MB maximum size.
3) Standard IT procedure when the mailbox is full - archive the older messages to a PST file.
4) Standard IT policy is going to forbid putting PST files on home drives or any other networked drive because they are going to take up needed space. (remember, storage is still expensive in corporate/government world - we can't go down to Fry's and just get a few disks and pop 'em in a server without killing anything that resembles a support contract)
From here, all it takes is a crashed hard drive, a virus infected system (wipe and restore), moving to a new computer and doing a less than good job of moving the files from the old one to the new one or even PST corruption and that stuff is just gone.
I work for local government (why I'm posting as an AC) in a state with strong Sunshine Laws. ALL of our incoming and outgoing emails are archived as they are part of the public record! Even if I deleted all of my emails, they can still be searched and produced if requested. Why isn't this the case at the Federal level????
Except for the upcoming election, where surely, this time the REAL Americans (white, wealthy, republican) will elect us a new King who will Save Us All!
Bullshit. Put them in jail for lying or gross incompetence.
.. that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
...It gets worse. They are now claiming "my dog ate my homework" for precisely, and only, every employee named in this investigation. It would be fitting to apply the IRS' own special rule here, which is that if you can't prove your innocence, you're guilty. Long sentences for each of the accused, unless those hard drives can be made to miraculously reappear.
...when did /.ers turn into teatards?
You're supposed to be computer people. You know that the Government has abysmal data retention policies and an abysmal track record of implementing up-to-date systems, period. OPM processes federal retirement paperwork by hand in a limestone mine, for God's sake. ("Sinkhole of bureaucracy" - Washington Post) Shit, I'm surprised they recycled the drive and didn't just eBay the damn thing, data intact.
Just ask the NSA and be done with it?
At least put them to good use as Automatic Backup Service for all the other governmental branches..
Someone should ask the NSA for a copy of the emails.
Thanks for the insightful comment. This really captures the entire left vs right debate.
Democrats think they are electing a King who will save them. Republicans want a President with limited powers and do not expect him to solve all of their problems.
That's why King Billy can molest an intern with a cigar, lie about it and get away with it. This is also why King O can lie and lie and lie some more and get away with it.
The hard crashed right after it was discovered that the IRS was involved in a partisan scam. Perfect timing.
And this from an administration so well known for it's cover-ups - like the Benghazi cover-up.
If this is what the government claims, then it must be true. We never get anything but 100% truth from our government, right?
So, when the right-wing ends up doing this to left-wing groups, it'll be no big deal, right?
I thing the whole thing reeks of conspiracy BUT having worked for multiple government agencies many of them severely limit the size of a users Exchange mailbox and because network storage is scarce they routinely counsel users to keep archived e-mail in a PST stored on the local drive. They tell the user that Outlook runs better this way (mostly true). Problem is this violates government policy on maintaining permanent records (not that the user cares) and means if the local drive crashes or is wiped for a new user all the old e-mail is lost.
Many corporations do the same BTW.
For my money the excuse is just a bit too convenient but plausible.
Then where do you draw the line? You clearly need a line, but that means you have to define it, and you need reasoning behind that definition.
I mean think: If we say that you are never on the hook so long as you were given an order by a supervisor, well then that means if they order you to kill someone, you are off the hook for that. Now clearly that is ludicrous. Everyone would say "Of course not in THAT case, they should know that is wrong!" Ok fine, so that means we need a line... Where's the line?
A pretty easy and clear line is illegality. You may not do something illegal just because someone ordered you to. In fact, that is where the military draws the line with their official oath. They pledge "hat I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice." So if an order is NOT according to the UCMJ, then they are actually not supposed to obey it (I'm not saying there are never situations where this becomes a conflict in real life). So one can argue a similar idea for civilians, particularly since unlike the military you are not bound by law to obey supervisors.
Regardless, if you want the line to be something other than illegality, you need to define what that line is, and you need justification for why.
All of you TP types that want the IRS to retain e-mails forever refuse to give the government a dime to build the system to retain that e-mails forever. It ain't cheap to build a backup system to maintain all the e-mails generated by a decent sized business or government agency. That's why retention dates are established and followed. Also why so many users have PST files on their local computer that violate the retention policy and gets the company in trouble with the lawyers and get deleted when a computer is rebuilt or the drive crashes.
If I remember correctly, Nixon's office lost and recycled data that was possibly incriminating and it ended up costing him the presidency.
At the very least, someone's head should roll at the IRS.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
They are now claiming "my dog ate my homework" for precisely, and only, every employee named in this investigation.
I imagine The IRS has had more than just those 7 hard drive failures.
But I imagine Congress doesn't really care how many annual hard drive failures the IRS sees across all its employee computers.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
That's what this appears every bit to be: a disturbing coverup of wide spread rampant acts of treason. There was a reason the founders of the United States made it a Republic - that is to offset the dangers of majority rule aka a mobocracy . But our Republic has been lost. We have failed to keep it and this IRS scandal is just another sign of that. Though admittedly I am unconvinced that the loss of the Republic started with the election of Obama. More likely it's occurred over time as a gradual process of Americans becoming more comfortable and supportive of bigger government and the enlargement of welfare and entitlements. It's really a shame though no matter when it happens that people fail enmasse to see the bad behaviors of majorities like the failure of the media and populace to demand more answers and accountability of the government in incidents like this one or the Bengahzzi embassy scandal etc etc.
Except for the upcoming election, where surely, this time the REAL Americans (white, wealthy, republican) will elect us a new King who will Save Us All!
The Tea Party arose largely because the Republican Party has made no serious effort to stop the radicals in the Democrat Party from wrecking the country.
Incidentally, the wealth distribution in the DP is bimodal, comprising the power hungry ultra-wealthy 1% and the parasites whose votes the wealthy buy with tax dollar handouts. The Republican Party, in contrast, has a much more uniform wealth distribution as it contains the productive middle class or at least it did before the RP leadership decided to help the DP in transforming the U.S. into just another democratic socialist state.
Most Americans are white. Is it your contention that the political concerns of white middle class citizens should be ignored, even though they represent the majority of Americans? Why does the left hate representative government so much? And why do you think that America elects a King?
If the IRS audited me, and I "lost" my receipts, I would be up the creek without a paddle. It should be applied the same to them.
Somebody needs to go to jail for mishandling this situation. Our government has gotten way, way out of control.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
So, dumb question: how old was the computer, and how old was the hard drive?
And who here has saved a hard drive that's crashed? (Actually, I think I have one.)
Datapoint for you antiAmerican Libertarians: I am an employee of a federal contractor. We buy systems, or drives, with the "keep your hard drive" opton. This is *NOT* for storing it forever, but rather because it may have PII or HIPAA data on it. If they're under warranty, then once they're replaced, or if they're out of warranty, you know what we do with ones that failed, physically? That we're *REQUIRED* to do, to protect that data?
We get them deGaussed.
Try recovering data from a brick, guys.
mark
You do of course know that only a "copy" of the email message is kept on the desktop machine. The original is kept on the email server. US Government requires that the email servers archive all emails for later retrieval. They are looking in the wrong place. I wonder why.
Fire all involved, including the people who testified to Congress that the emails were 'lost'.
From 2001-2011, I worked for a series of contractors under NASA.
Most users who I supported were administrators and managers of various stripes, and a few users who were skilled with desktop publishing, web development, imagery, video, or 3d modeling/CAD. Most of them didn't understand how computers worked, and didn't care how they worked. They were just magic boxes that they used to do work with.
The idea of deleting email was frightening to most users. Email was a record that proved that you did work, and could be used for Cover Your Ass in the event of an inquiry. It could also prove a conversation happened, that an agreement was made, and so settle many disputes arising out of miscommunication. Most people whom I worked with hardly ever deleted messages, and because their local hard drive had plenty of capacity, they didn't have a real need to.
Until 2007, we used POP3 clients running on the local machine to download mail from a server. Messages were deleted from the server once downloaded, so only existed on the client machine at that point. Some users had decades of email stored in their client on their local hard drive, which typically was not backed up. I'm sure the servers had some redundancy and short backup, but to my knowledge we did not have a system that archived email. The closest thing resembling an archive was the aggregate collection of all mailboxes on the the client machines' hard drives.
Occasionally we did have users lose data due to a failed hard drive. Users who got bit by data loss tended to learn from this and implement safeguard such as backup to server, or to removable media. But incredibly, these lessons, once learned, were not applied at more than the individual level. People might talk to each other and departments might share knowledge for how to back up data, but it was never something that was codified in policy. People were on their own to implement their own backup and to make sure it worked. It was something that if anything, was encouraged, but not required or enforced. But very often it was not thought about until after the fact of a data loss incident.
In 2007, we moved to Outlook/Exchange for email. Many long time users were very put off by the change, and did not want to give up their Eudora, and could not deal with the fact that we were not going to migrate their old email into Exchange. Enough resistance was put up that IT ended up continuing to support the client side of the old email system indefinitely, so that users could still access their local archive of old email, and possibly also use automation features in their old client to continue to run processes that generated automated mail messages.
Exchange uses MAPI, so in the new system our messages were now always left on the server, until deleted. We had 1GB server quotas (around this time I believe Gmail was giving the world ~6GB for free). In theory, the 1GB server quota gave us security from data loss because the Exchange server's storage was backed up. In fact, the low quota size forced much more mail deletion than had ever happened in the old POP3 days of decentralized, distributed ad-hoc archive. But this was by design rather than by defect. And it was a lot easier to restore any retained data if it was lost.
All the same, users did not want to delete email, ever. Once they hit their quota on the server, they'd submit requests asking for an increase to their quota, which only would be granted if the volume of incoming mail that they had to deal with made a larger quota necessary in order to allow them to have a reasonable backlog of mail going back 6 months to a year, or they had a senior enough position that they could get whatever they demanded. Even then, when people hit their new quota, they still didn't want to delete old messages. The IT team supporting the new email refused to support this in any way, but didn't prevent users from creating local .pst files which they could use to store mail, once again on the local hard drive
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
2015 no one in the USA pay taxes
fuck the federal reserve
fuck the IRS
and fuck all of these parasite cocksucker corrupt to the bone public "servants"
Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) is trying to enlist the National Security Agency in the hunt for missing emails to and from the IRS’s Lois Lerner.
In a letter to NSA Director Michael Rogers on Friday, Stockman requested that the NSA turn over information it has about emails between Lerner and outside groups between January 2009 and April 2011.
http://thehill.com/policy/technology/209390-stockman-asks-nsa-for-help-with-lost-irs-emails
The IRS told lawmakers this week that it can’t produce those emails as a result of computer problems, prompting criticism from Republicans who say the agency is impeding the three congressional investigations into IRS practices.
Stockman’s request for the NSA’s “metadata” on the emails comes as congressional Republicans probe whether the IRS mishandled applications for tax-exempt status from Tea Party and conservative groups.
In a statement, Stockman said the NSA’s information “will establish who Lerner contacted and when, which helps investigators determine the extent of illegal activity by the IRS.”
“Your prompt cooperation in this matter will be greatly appreciated and will help establish how IRS and other personnel violated rights protected by the First Amendment,” Rogers wrote.
I'm going to sidestep the actual debate here ("Lost Emails: Incompetence or Conspiracy?"), and just put it out there that using word-for-word talking points from conservative talk radio—like "the dog ate my homework"—makes it really hard to take an argument seriously.
If I wanted to know what Herman Cain's opinion was, I would have tuned in this morning to his show (which I did), to hear him say that this was like whining that "the dog ate my homework, and now I can't find my dog." And then, I could have also gotten Rush Limbaugh's sage opinion that this is a case of crying "the dog ate my homework." I'm sure Hannity is saying it right now, and O'Reilly will say it later.
Look, this may be a case of pure corruption and lies, unconstitutional targeting out of political spite reaching to the highest levels. If it is, LL should go to jail, those responsible should be prosecuted, and the conservative pundits will get my blessing to all simultaneously jizz in their pants.
I have my own gripes with Obama (NSA surveillance for starters), and I am open to well-reasoned arguments about his administration's failings. But using canned phraseology—written by people that measure and calculate how effectively various wordings can be used to rile up the base and grab soundbites—will get you nowhere.
Similarly short shrift goes to things like: calling all taxes and regulations "job killers"; sardonically calling Islam "the religion of peaaaace"; calling Obama "The Community Organizer"; chanting pithy-but-meaningless phrases like "Bush lied people died"; appending "-Gate" to the end of anything remotely controversial; and pretty much any pundit, politician, or political group calling anything "racist."
Note this rant is not personally directed at you, Applehu, but you just happen to be the winning 19th poster to use this straight-from-the-show-notes talk radio quote.
</rant>
Nothing posted to
Yet if anybody else tries that, it's jail time for obstruction of justice...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Except that there's lots of things that are illegal or legal according to the wider context. Violent actions are pretty much all illegal in civilian life, except for self-defense, and that's not much wider a context. Reformatting a drive is legal unless there's a specific reason why it's illegal, and that does depend on a wider context. Heck, I don't know if the reformatting was illegal; does the law say it's illegal to destroy evidence, or illegal to knowingly destroy evidence?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Has anybody asked for email records of employees not named in this investigation? Do we know their email is still available?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Stings when a nerve is hit, doesn't it?
Actually, I have been recently listening to exactly none of the shows you cite. But I'm sure that if you work for the IRS, you're going to automatically assume I'm guilty.
Ironic. From the 2007 Bush Administration a real scandal (Valerie Plame) and a real cover-up.
http://politics.slashdot.org/story/07/06/19/0018249/white-house-e-mail-scandal-widens?sbsrc=thisday
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
for Criminals in Chief...which seems to be the only kind of "Chief" we get any more.
And this BS of a "Presidential pardon" needs to go the way of the DoDo bird.
Well, and now I'm hearing they were "recycled" not failed. The timing of the XP to Win7 migration coincides with the data loss. They could have simply been re-imaged with workers "illegally" keeping emails locally and not backed up. Thats not even negligence on the part of the IRS at that point. So long as the policy to keep emails was well known and enforced when known to be broken.
Learn to love Alaska
On Pasadena City College radio station KPCC today, Sean Gallagher, IT Editor at Ars Technica talked about the governments problems with technology and computer systems. Some of these may be part of the reason for the lost hard drives.
(Clue, some of the possible reasons are simply bumbling, or lack of budgeting to do a proper IT job, or government restrictions on buying things (procurement), or, ahem, a lot of tech is being outsourced to the private sector).
Here is a link, with a 'listen now' link on the page, sorry you need to cut and paste.
http://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/2014/06/19/37997/the-irs-emails-system-breakdown-or-subterfuge/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+kpccAirTalk+%28KPCC%3A+AirTalk%29
You may now resume screeching at each other.
Er, what? Don't know what you're getting at with the "work for the IRS" bit. I'll admit that people (including friends and family) arguing from canned soundbites does agitate me, though I don't doubt you for a second when you say you don't personally listen to the source material. Again, the rant was not really directed at your post. But when you see, time and again, these pre-packaged chunks of partisan messaging being bandied about as if they were real arguments, it just comes off so brainwashy. FWIW I agree that losing all these emails in precisely this way seems highly suspicious.
Nothing posted to
at 66, it's become more of a floppy
Yes, we can probably all agree that the hardware was old and it failed. But that has absolutely nothing to do with this story. Other than for local storage, email is not kept on local hard drives. I know that many have a PST file on their laptop, but this is so that you can use it when you are not connected to the network. Email is stored in huge databases that are on redundant arrays of disks that can withstand multiple drive failures and are backed up probably as often as every night.
You can't lose just one person's email. If you lose the database, then hundreds or thousands of people will lose their email. But even that is not likely. I have email going back to when I started with my company in 2007. The government has regulations on how far back to keep data. It is all backed up somewhere IF, and that is a big IF, there actually was a hardware problem with the email servers.
I'm a backup administrator who works for a large insurance company. Any customer facing data is backed up monthly and saved for 10 years. Any data that the legal department feels might be subpoenaed is saved for 10 years. The IRS had to know that the emails were being actively investigated by congress and they were and are legally bound to have done due diligence and made sure they were all backed up and saved for a reasonable amount of time. Congress needs to send independent FBI investigators in and make sure what was testified was the truth and that there was no foul play going on. If in fact this was all a awful mistake then fine if not then people need to face charges of hindering an investigation, contempt of congress, lying to congress and on and on. The FBI needs to audit along the DR policies of the IRS. The whole we are sorry the PC crashed and or the hard drives were wiped and sent to be recycled rings hollow. It really smells like a cover up and this is what I would consider a constitutional crisis. Allowing the IRS to serve as a political weapon. That needs to stop and people need to go to jail. This is actually much worse than Watergate. As Watergate was comical and slightly sinister with the coverup. This is just plain evil. It's what I would expect from Russia or China and places like that.
Paul E. Bahre
Inspetcor General reported to congress that this was POLITICAL and NOT balanced. The IRS sorted through the applications pulling-out the conservative groups and the liberal groups. The non-selected for special tratment groups got the regular reviews (in other words the normal process you dishonestly claim was all the IRS was doing). The liberal groups got sped-up expidited processing (Obama's brother had a group that was approved in only 35 days WITH A RETRO-ACTIVE certification!!!!!). The TEA PArtiers got chucked into a circular process of neither being approved nor denied (worse than a denial since applicants who are denied can start an appeal).
Your equally dishonest rant about how many documents have been turned-over is also transparent. If you ask me for 5 emails and I respond by giving you a BILLION blank pages of paper instead.... and then anytime you re-ask for those 5 emails I respond by saying "I've already GIVEN you a BILLION pages, so you clearly have no case!" I guarantee that YOU would be pissed
Obama's own Inspector General published this stuff into the Federal Record. You lefties that just try to confuse the general population with "spin" (aka LIES) are despicable. President Obama has USED the IRS as a weapon against his political opponents; something Democrats tried to impeach Nixon for only TALKING about. President Obama has appointed one of his campaing donors to "investigate" the matter (would you have supported Bush if he had done these things? if not, then you're just an obnoxious Obama sycophant). The Congress has been repeatedly lied to about this matter, under oath (the federal offense called "perjury") by several Obama administration officials who are now claiming to have lost a huge pile of related e-mails from the simultaneous failures of 7 different employee's computers and an apparently inexplicable inability to live-up to long-standing federal data retension laws. The woman at the center of this (Louis Lerner) has had to "plead the 5th" (asserting that if she told the truth she might be headed to jail, therefore she will not testify). Pleading the 5th is a right of the individual trying to save his/her own skin, BUT the public is perfectly entitled (by law) to presume laws were broken within the agency when an agency or its employees witholds information. We now KNOW from documents congress got that the IRS was illegally passing private information on the TEA partiers to other agencies (for harrassment and even to see if there was any way to prosecute them for anything) and to outside groups (Obama supporters who then used that information against their TEA Party opponents) . These are ALL FELONIES. Anybody who is not outraged by this is NOT an American.
1. "Blame Bush" is getting old... is Obama accountable for ANYTHING?
2. Those federal prosecutors are at-will employees of the President and Bush did THE SAME THING CLINTON DID (and many before him also did) in firing them and hiring the ones he wanted. That's been normal procedure since WWII. OBAMA HAS DONE THE SAME THING!. It was just the Democrat-aligned press that decided it was "evil" when Bush did it (probably aided by an ignoran public and the fact that Bush, unlike his predecessors, did not fire ALL of them and hire an entire new set - Bush only fired and replaced SOME, which is arguable more decent.) Were the ones Bush fired involved in cases? Yes, of course... just as those Clinton and Obama fired and replaced were involved in cases. I'll happily agree that Bush was wrong to do it WHEN Democrats agree Clinton and Obama and Carter and Johnson were wrong to do it.
McClatchy "news service"??? Seriously? Why not just go directly to the DNC for your "talking points" and eliminate the middle-man.
I just love it when Democrats cite Democrats as proof of anything political...
I've worked at places where the size of my mailbox was, literally, limited to 25 cents' worth of hard drive space.
Granted, hard drive prices fall rapidly; maybe when the quota was first imposed, it was the equivalent of 25 dollars' worth of hard drive space, and the policy was never revisited while storage costs fell by two orders of magnitude. Still, a $25 limit on one of a professional's most important tools is very stingy. I could expense $25 for a single breakfast if I wanted to (although I never have).
it was "illegal" for them to use email, and they used mail or phone exclusively
Another policy that doesn't make sense. It's easier to audit an employee's email interactions with the public, than his or her telephone interactions with the public.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
A bunch of leftists who all agree to the same things, want the same government policies, go to the same parties in DC and NYC, hang out with all the "good people" who agree with them on everything... they'll all do the same thing without any need to coordinate. It's called "group think" or "living in a bubble".
90%+ of the journalists in the US admit to being Democrats, or further left... it's been studied repeatedly. When's the last time you say a newscast in which ANY belief of the Democrat party was not presumed to be the correct belief?
Why, on the evening after the missing emails story surfaced, did NONE of the alphabet networks mention it on their news?
At a time when the President was hammering the "guns" issue and his secretary of state (Hillary) was making speeches in Mexico about the need for gun control in the US to help reduce violence in Mexico (from American guns), it turned-out that the Obama admin was strong-arming gun sellers near the border into making sales of assault weapons to known "straw purchasers" (a criminal act) for use by mexican drug gangs....WHY did one network not tell their viewers about this and the US border agent killed by one of those guns, for nearly a YEAR? and why did the others give it only SECONDS of airtime?
How many SECONDS of airtime have the big 3 networks spent telling their audience that [1] Obama ridiculed McCain in 2008 for the prediction that if Obama pulled-out of Iraq precipitously and without a residual force the place would melt-down with one or more terrorist armies on the move and [2] that the guy leading ISIS in its push though Iraq was let out of prison by Obama? (yeah, they guy "beheading his way to Baghdad" and upon whose head Obama has placed a bounty WAS already in our custody before Obama set him free!
NONE of this is a conspiracy - these people are all just so far up Obama's butt they cannot report honest news.
Most news reports seem quite accepting of the story that the emails are irretrievably gone because Lerner's local hard drive crashed.
Is it just because journalists are ignorant of how enterprise email systems typically work (messages stored on an Exchange server with offsite backups)?
Or is it the ultimate proof of the mainstream media being "in the tank" for the Administration?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Because it was already determined eons ago that there was no more scrutiny applied to the Teabagger non-profit applications than to die-hard "liberal" applications. The Teabagger scum are just angry they weren't allowed to be above the law.
You may be right that they aren't issued cutting-edge laptops. Nonetheless, think about this: thanks to incomes growing faster than the rate of inflation, basic commodities, like a gallon of milk, consume a significantly smaller fraction of a family's income than they did a generation ago. (This is known as Engel's Law.) And that effect is orders-of-magnitude larger for technological commodities, like a gigaflop of computing power.
Government services, too, ought to be costing a smaller fraction of a family's income. (Especially because government uses technology to provide its services. Most government workers sit in front of a computer all day.) But government services are about the only thing that is bucking the trend, and consuming a larger fraction of a family's income!
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Having worked for the government and understanding the policy of "forever" archival of communication and a true understanding of IT data storage capabilities including off site archival in large underground bunkers provided by Iron Mountain. The excuse of "the hard drive crashed" is such a complete line of bullshit I can't even fathom the concept that anyone reading /. would ever think this is a legitimate reason for someone to excuse themselves from being questioned by a government committee. It's like saying the dog ate my homework!!!
incompetent, it's time to just get rid of it.
Most of what they do is harass poor and middle class people anyway.
give its hard drive to the IRS? Was it subpoenad?
The NSA may actually get to prove its usefulness as Congress is now asking the NSA for Lois Lerner's e-mails.
http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/20/lawmakers-call-on-nsa-to-turn-over-lerners-lost-emails/
How insightful our founders were to have each branch check the others' powers.