In other news…
Shades of Rose Mary Woods:
Today, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) issued the following statement regarding the Internal Revenue Service informing the Committee that they have lost Lois Lerner emails from a period of January 2009 ”“ April 2011. Due to a supposed computer crash, the agency only has Lerner emails to and from other IRS employees during this time frame.
No one will believe this.
Lucid:
Yes, no one will believe it, even if by some wild chance it happens to be true.
Which I don’t think it is.
Knew they were going to wipe the data sooner or later. Only the NSA backups would be relatively immune.
bury the body where it can never be found…
It’s an implicit admission that culpability and involvement go all the way to the top and that exposure of that fact must be prevented, no matter what.
Bullshit. How does a computer crash destroy two years? I’m zero on computer knowledge, but I know even erased memory can be restored. Isn’t there record keeping requirements for a backup? If her storage was on the cloud, then how could a computer crash knock it out?
I don’t see how this can survive technical expert scrutiny.
Let a business tell the IRS that a computer crash destroyed two years of data under audit and see what happens.
the modern equivalent of “My dog ate my homework”
right now, about a few thousand of us programmers, hackers, analysts, and stuff are having a very heated argument wearing bs neckwaders as hipwaders are way too low
by the way, that’s up there with the idea that the NSA computers are too complex to stop from deleting evidence automatically…
there comes a point where what your doing is so stupid, even stupid is smart enough to know it even if you dont. – artfldgr
What a brazen lie.
This all sounds utterly bogus. I last worked for a federal government contractor in 2007, and we had to have both in-house and off-site backup of all computer files. It was a requirement written into our contract.
Lerner pleads the Fifth. Lerner’s e-mails have been been made unavailable due to a “computer crash.”
POTUS: “not a smidgen of corruption” in IRS tales.
Yeah, right.
Having worked in network support for a time there is almost certainly an off site backup available. I’m not buying a local server crash as losing the required emails.
but you see.. if someone claims there is an email, your a conspiracy theorist. ie. in one fell swoop, anyone who wants to pursue it is now a nutter
Lying liars lie-reptitively.
blert Says:
June 13th, 2014 at 5:52 pm
They’re flipping us the bird on a daily basis.
There will be rolling blackouts in DC in November 2016 from all the shredders running 24/7.
Sure. Lois’s hard drive crashed about the same time Hillary fell down and hit her head.
And for the same reason.
Now the messiah is throwing servers under the bus.
“There will be rolling blackouts in DC in November 2016 from all the shredders running 24/7.”
Thanks for the laugh! And servers will melt because global warming.
Yep. The dog ate my homework excuse. I ain’t buying it/
Email is not usually stored on personal comp hard drive … at least not at the company I worked.
It’s stored on a “network” drive.
Rosemary Woods is a very exclusive part of town.
Tonawanda:
Two words. I will fix, thanks.
They are all criminals.
Arrests, trials and criminal sentences need to happen.
The Obama era is all about revisiting the 1970s – the Carter are of stagnant (real) economic growth (eg, incomes), joblessness, lack of trust and honesty, socialism, authoritarianism (eg, wage and price controls of the Nixon, era).
So, what’s another one? Judged by the 1970s, Obama’s a great success de scandal!
Yes, they’re flipping us the bird with both hands. It’s become so common with this bunch of jerks.
This also assumes that Lois Lerner was only using her standard issue IRS email to conduct her business. Who’s to say she didn’t have her own version of a “Richard Windsor” account like Lisa Jackson, or have 4 different accounts like Kathleen Sebelius. Not that we’ll ever know.
The only way this is at all plausible is if her email was on her PC and never got backed up. That in turn is only at all plausible if the IRS was in 2009 technologically way behind even very small and small-time organizations such as my employer. There is also the fact that an email sent from me to you is now every bit as much a part of your system as it is of mine and could be harvested from your end.
I’d say there is just barely enough here to prevent one from saying it’s totally impossible. Which will probably be plenty for the administration to hide behind.
And why should Boner’s Republican house worry about another federal crime? They’re happier than anyone the IRS shutdown the TEA party. This is only a minor distraction in their focused mission to do nothing about much more serious crimes by the BO administration.
Incredibly discouraging, all of it. The barbarians have won.
But at least we can treat each other with respect and affection while it is not forbidden.
The Barbarians have won? Have you been tongue tied? I like to read, with relish, your posts, but outright abjection and surrender? Ohhh. Ich.
It’s not incredibly discouraging. It’s actually encouraging to see that evil and incompetence are objectively reward with just consequences.
Tonawanda:
It’s not over.
Litigation is something! Fighting the good fight is hard and requires perseverance. But fight the fight and in my experience, if your cause was just and you have evidence, you will win. (Thus the fight to hide the evidence. But sometimes, even without the evidence, the ipso facto argument is so strong, and there may be a legal presumption, that you can win because of the loss of evidence. Call terminating sanctions and has to be the greatest win in a lawsuit you can imagine.)
Serving discovery (special interrogatories, requests for admissions, inspection demands, depositions) upon the opposite party is always a hoot. You know you’re going to get back mostly crap. Then you do a meet and confer letter that spells out how their objections are without merit and their answers non-responsive. Half will provide better responses; half will not. Then you have to do a motion to compel further responses which requires a notice, a memorandum of points and authorities, a separate statement which is the interrogatories, their responses, and your ‘reasons for further response required,’ as well as a declaration and a proposed order. All that to obtain basic information. And courts hate that motion because it is so fact specific and time consuming. Don’t bring too many disputes or the Court is likely to find a way to short cut, which will not be in your favor as the movant. l
But, if you don’t do that, you are sunk. You’ve lost the discovery and good trial lawyers will sink you at trial with evidence objections. Do it, make the effort, endure the injustice, and you may win.
The ipso facto argument, by the way, is that the mere fact that the records have been lost, ipso facto, means guilt.
Not to worry, the NSA has them or can get them. Unless their ‘puters broke down too. 🙂
They do think they can tell just about any whopper and the bitter clingers will swallow it. 🙁
It’s almost like living in the USSR. Except we don’t have to stand in line for bread……yet.
All this stuff is backed up; also, there’s always the NSA.
Lying liars who lie.
A pretty desperate lie, if you ask me. This is the sort of thing that can be proven or disproven if the House Republicans are willing to keep pushing through the weeds. And how politically loyal are the underlings who run the computer systems at the IRS going to be? The web of deceit is getting pretty tangled.
waitforit at 9:45 PM
I saw what you did there!
Lol … I deserved it.
At what point will we find our Alexander Butterfield?
At what point they will find that the center will no longer hold, and the truth will out? The difference is that those that tell us what the world is through our media have no interest. To ask would be blasphemy, to persist would be racist.
Yet, at some point man has an unquenchable thirst for the truth. Our only hope is in human nature itself.
So sorry,
The dog ate my homework.
Chaffetz fights back with video: testimony that Lerner’s emails were archived!
They need to take legal action on this.
http://tinyurl.com/n2g4n68
The timeline suggests the cat was out of the bag in “mid 2011”. I am guessing the e-mails in question were eliminated just prior the IG starting his investigation.
And, yes, this is a coverup of serious proportions, not that the media will pay it any attention.
I would guess the e-mails would show Democrat members of Congress corresponding with Lerner, and Lerner corresponding with operatives in the White House.
How likely does anyone think the following conditions could be met in a random hard drive crash:
–That just the two years in contention were damaged,
–That just Lois Lerner’s emails were damaged,
–That just Lerner’s emails to the White house and Treasury indicting higher ups was damaged,
–That no back ups are available, none over a two year period,
–That the crashed hard drive data can’t be recovered. Something done everyday now.
So it’s obviously criminal. As Ben Shapiro’s new book says, let’s prosecute.
The obvious point needs to be made, just for the sake of diligence: this deletion of emails is nearly impossible, and the only way it could be possible is though criminal negligence or malfeasance.
After that, action needs to be taken.
If there must exist a backup somewhere, then Republicans must make a hasty effort to find and secure it. This may be aided by court orders, since one apparent destruction of evidence has already occurred.
– the backup server(s) must be located.
– all other agencies suspected of receiving emails from Lerner must be subpoenaed to turn over their copies immediately.
– NSA should be queried on any information they may have. Already, I’ve read that one representative has requested copies of Lerner’s metadata from the NSA.
– forensic data reconstructionists must be given access to the IRS’ system, maybe under the aegis of the IG.
– private IT firms that were involved may have their own copies of data.
From a political perspective, this move will alienate any tech-savvy Obama supporters, as they know this is grade A bullshit. This whole thing is tantamount to an admission of guilt, and the clear implication of making such a brazen claim is that the truth is much, much worse.
But we need evidence. And if we believe our own claims, it must be out there somewhere.
I agree with Yancey Ward’s idea of what the emails likely show.
This is how email works …
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/06/13/veteran-it-professional-gives-six-reasons-why-the-irs-claim-that-it-lost-two-years-of-lois-lerners-emails-is-simply-not-feasible/
1. I believe the government uses Microsoft Exchange for their email servers. They have built-in exchange mail database redundancy. So, unless they did not follow Microsofts recommendations they are telling a falsehood. You can see by the diagram below that if you have three servers in a DAG you have three copies of the database.
2. Every IT organization that I know of has hotswappable disk drives. Every server built since 2000 has them. Meaning that if a single disk goes bad it’s easy to replace.
3. ALL Servers use some form of RAID technology. The only way that data can be totally lost (Meaning difficult to bring back) is if more than a single disk goes before the first bad disk is replaced. In the diagram below you can see that its possible to lose a single disk and still keep the data.
4. If the server crashed (Hardware failure other than disks), then the disks that contain the DATA for the Exchange database is still available because the server hardware and disks are exchangeable. Meaning that if I have another server with the same hardware in it, I can put the disks in and everything should boot right up.
5. All email servers in a professional organization use TAPE backup. Meaning if all the above fails, you can restore the server using the TAPE backups.
6. If they are talking about her local PC, then it’s a simple matter of going to the servers which have the email and getting them from the servers. If the servers have removed the data you can still get them by using the backups of the servers to recover the emails.
Her personal PC can crash all day long and the emails are still available!
Not when they destroyed the data by reformatting it 5025 times.
Just more proof that government in general is incompetent and dangerous.
I work for an F200 financial services company. We typically have 5 to 50 federal auditors digging through our trash and eating our food.
If we “lost” one effing email our CEO would be roasted, we would be threatened with closure, and we would get a multi-million dollar fine.
Further, the email were not just on one computer. There is her computer, anybody that was also on the “To” list, anybody on the “CC” list, the email servers, and backups.
UNLESS OF COURSE THIS WAS A CONSPIRACY – THEN YOU WOULDN’T LEAVE THINGS ON SERVERS OR MAKE BACKUPS.
Good information, Jack.
Every disaster recovery plan has data archived/backed up at an offsite facility (so, say, the IRS wouldn’t lose all their data should their DC HQ be destroyed). In fact, there are private companies that host these backup servers in totally secured, disaster-proofed facilities (to the extent that is possible) to ensure that you are completely covered regardless/in spite of what your onsite IT staff/facilities personnel can handle.
Conspiracies tend to work faster than the IRS. How long have they had to purge the records from 2011?
My experience is that the political types usually don’t know squat about the technical aspects of computers or computer system architecture so long as they can turn on their computers and they run. So, they may think that all of the e-mails have been “lost”–so sorry, but my guess is that there are backups somewhere, and I assume that as a final resort, the NSA has copies as well.
So, instead of getting some weasel politician or political appointee up before a committee, where they can do what they do best–conveniently “forget,” artfully parse their responses, and plain old lie their asses off–I’d subpoena the technical support staff, the computer guys, and sweat them, since they likely don’t have so much invested politically in deep sixing the truth.
The whole upshot of this is that those emails can be had UNLESS they were “specifically targeted for destruction by a highly competent IT admin” … which is possible.
Find that admin and you’ll have the evidence that at least they were destroyed.
Wolla Dalbo:
But the thing is, I’m one of the most tech-UN-savvy people in the world. But even I know full well that things deleted are not deleted forever. They can be found, recovered, unearthed, by computer experts.
So even the political people on the left must know this. You don’t have to be tech-savvy to know it! If so, I think that perhaps they are stalling for time in some way, or hope that the Republicans won’t manage to get the power to do the proper research to find the evidence. Or perhaps they just think the left and the MSM—or Eric Holder—will continue to protect them.
I haven’t checked yet, but I’m wondering what the left and the MSM are saying about the loss of the emails. Maybe I’ll take a look; should be interesting.
Or maybe they think the evidence has been erased, and that’s what they bought time with Lerner’s 5th.
Politico.com has looked at the letter the IRS sent Congress and if it contains the truth, it looks as if they may have a very bad backup system:
It’s easy to make a HD crash. Just get a super magnet on it. Or put it inside an electromagnetic field.
@ neo-neocon, 2:27
I’ve had the same thoughts.
This lie is too brazen to think it might work. It’s too easy to prove wrong, and too many people have enough understanding of email redundancy to believe it.
So what are they playing at?
Are they stalling for time, as the Republicans track down the backed-up emails?
Is this a double-bluff (IMO, unlikely), and Dems know the emails in question contain no smoking gun? (this would be used to embarrass Republicans and discredit the investigation later)
Is the process itself of tracking down the emails supposed to discredit Republicans? (to be presented as evidence of an overzealous “witch hunt”)
Given this administration’s “one day at a time” approach to everything, I think I’m leaning towards stalling.
Thank you for the good writeup. It actually was once a enjoyment account it. Glance advanced to more added agreeable from you! However, how could we communicate?
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