Sigh. One of the reasons P&N is such a useless cesspool is it has too many people who cannot separate fact from supposition and innuendo. They mindlessly swallow whatever swill their favorite propaganda source spews with no attempt at critical thought and no effort to verify its accuracy.
[ ... ] Given that all her emails have to go somewhere, seemingly the only potential for an actual net loss in Lerner's emails is on email threads strictly between Lerner and other IRS employee's whose emails have also been lost.
Not exactly. While those internal IRS emails may have been lost as well, the real issue is that we lost all external email from that period. That is a legitimate concern. Of course contrary to Congressman Camp's innuendo, those emails aren't necessarily to the White House, Justice Department, or "Democratic offices" (though
some may have been). It is likely that most were the same sort of innocuous external emails most of us have: commercial messages (suppliers, trade and professional material, ads, and spam), personal email, and all the usual forwarded stuff that you either love or hate (Yay! Aunt Emma sent me more cat pictures!)
As you note, the IRS made a great effort to recover her internal emails, and indeed produced 24,000 of them from 82 other employee computers. We simply do not know what else was lost, however.
Hard drives simply don't crash that often.
Actually, in an organization with thousands (tens of thousands?) of PCs, hard drives do crash that often. Especially if those hard drives are in low-bid PCs that have been kept for too many years. That is just speculation, however. I do not know that this was the case within the IRS, but it is certainly consistent with your next point:
The other perhaps more scandalous issue is the backwards nature of federal IT, at least specifically at the IRS. Email retention and archiving has been so cheap for years now that it's sad they haven't upgraded. ...
This is not unique to the IRS. I have first-hand experience with two other very large corporations that had similarly incompetent policies at one time. That said, I always thought such policies were horribly short-sighted. When Google can afford to give people gigabytes for free, it's hard to defend policies that limit people to 150 MB, or later 500 MB, of stored email.
The defense to such policies has always been, "The user needs to take responsibility for cleaning up old email and manually saving anything important." That's a great theory, but I've never seen it work in practice.
[ ... ] There are ways to recover everything from a failed drive in many cases. The IRS would have us believe each and every incident was completely catastrophic and unrecoverable. ...
Link? As far as I've read, it's only Lerner's drive they said was unrecoverable. The others were merely reported as crashed, with no information about recovery attempts. In Lerner's case, they did send her drive to their forensics folks to attempt recovery. I would expect the IRS has top notch people and tools for this since they probably run into a lot of "customers" with "crashed" drives. Again, this is admittedly speculative.
Perhaps you're forgetting a critical detail: can you explain exactly how anyone would know who Lerner sent emails to (or received them from) now that all her emails in/out of the IRS were conveniently destroyed once investigators began snooping around? ...
But that's not when it happened. Lerner lost her hard drive in July, 2011. One of the Washington Post articles has the dated emails corroborating this, as she worked with IT to try to get her data back. All of the controversy around this started nearly a year later. The first newspaper stories were published in February, 2012. Congress didn't get visibly involved until March, 2012, and that's when Commissioner Shulman was first asked to appear. Mitchell filed her "True the Vote" lawsuit in May, 2012. Finally, TIGTA started its audit in June, 2012.
In short, if Lerner was deliberately destroying evidence, she seems to have the gift of prescience. She beat the investigators by a good nine to ten months.
By the way, that's also why all the smoke from Mitchell is baseless. She can't claim the IRS broke the law and destroyed this evidence when it happened ten months
before she filed suit.
We could still get additional details from inside the IRS, but since they haven't been cooperating since the beginning ...
I don't know. Sending the drive to their internal experts and pulling email from 82 other employees' PCs seems to show some good faith.
One other piece of disinformation, not in any of the comments I quoted, is the declaration that Lerner broke the law because she failed to print and file all of these emails. There are two problems with this claim. First, we have no idea what she did or did not print. There has been no mention of any effort to reconcile Lerner's paper files with emails from this period.
Second, the law doesn't require that she preserve
all email. It requires she preserve "official records". Official records has a subjective definition, and is interpreted by each individual. Lerner may well have printed and filed everything she considered a record. Again, we don't know, however, because I've seen nothing reported about it.
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