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Home » More on the IRS: the timeline, and some questions

More on the IRS: the timeline, and some questions

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s been difficult getting clear on the IRS timeline, but here are some salient facts that have come out recently, from Kimberley Strassel at the WSJ:

As to Ms. Lerner’s behavior, consider that House Ways & Means Chairman Dave Camp first sent a letter asking if the IRS was engaged in targeting in June, 2011. Ms. Lerner denied it. She engineered a plant in an audience at a tax conference in May 2013 to drop the bombshell news about targeting (maybe hoping nobody would notice?). She has subsequently asserted a Fifth Amendment right to silence in front of the only people actually investigating the affair, Congress. Now we learn that her hard drive supposedly defied modernity and suffered total annihilation about 10 days after the Camp letter arrived.

Some “coincidences” are just too coincidental.

It’s also been hard to get much information on the emails of the people I call the IRS Six—those other IRS employees who figure in the investigation and whose emails, just like Lois Lerner’s, have “coincidentally” disappeared off the face of the earth. Most articles I’ve read so far mention the Six but fail to indicate whether the IRS is claiming their email difficulties occurred in separate incidents, or whether it all happened in a single huge kaboom. Also, I haven’t read whether other IRS employees were affected or just these Six plus Lerner.

In addition, I’d love to know how often such crashes happen at the IRS. Are they a routine matter? If not, the crash becomes even more suspicious, if such a thing were possible. And if so, why on earth wouldn’t the IRS have fixed the problem—or at least, its backup system—long long ago? Is it possible that the IRS doesn’t want its emails saved for very long? And why, pray tell, would that be?

I’ve also had some difficulty finding the exact date range of the missing emails. I know that information is out there, because I’ve seen it before, but I don’t recall where and I can’t seem to find it now.

However, I did find this Seattle Times article purporting to give the timeline for the IRS scandal. But its timeline is incomplete, to say the least. For example, it leaves out the Camp letter that Strassel at the WSJ indicates Lerner received 10 days before her computer crash, and it doesn’t tell us the dates of the missing emails. It does add this, though:

Dcember 2011: The computer of Lerner’s boss’ chief of staff, Nikole Flax, crashes.

So at least we know that one of the Six had a separate crash; I suppose it stands to reason they all did. What are the chances of that being a coincidence (again, it would help to know whether the IRS system was so bad that computers were crashing constantly everywhere)? And what was the timeline on each crash for the Six?

Flax is the person who has since been reported as having visited the White House “35 times after talking with former head of tax exempt groups Lois Lerner about working to criminally prosecute conservative tea party groups for ‘lying’ about political activity.” Flax is listed as having spoken with a top Obama aide during some of those meetings.

So I’ve got another question: what was Flax’s timeline for these White House visits? Had she been going to the White House at the same rate in 2009, for example? Or did her meetings suddenly begin at a certain point, and if so, when? What about her predecessor? Did that person go to the White House much, if at all?

Strassel lists some of the other smoke surrounding this smoldering fire:

But the alleged disappearance of Ms. Lerner’s hard drive””and the fact that the missing conversations are those the former IRS director had with people outside the IRS””has suddenly resurrected, with force, the explosive possibility that she was chatting with Democrats who mattered.

There’s plenty of reason to believe she was. Just last week Congress discovered (via a subpoena to the Justice Department) emails showing that Ms. Lerner had conversations with Justice prosecutors about investigating conservative nonprofits. Who else in the Obama administration was Ms. Lerner talking to?

Or consider the extraordinary interaction between congressional Democrats and the IRS. Some of it was in a recent complaint filed to the Senate Ethics Committee by the Center for Competitive Politics against nine Democratic senators. It details their many letters and statements (that we know of) demanding the IRS shut down specific organizations that posed a threat to their Democratic House and Senate majority in the 2010 election.

I’ve been puzzled by something else in connection with the IRS scandal and the emails in particular: why would the emails show anything that implicated the senders, even if they are guilty? Why would people plotting something like this leave incriminating evidence in emails, which tend to be hard to eradicate (that is, if you’re not in the IRS, in which case it’s apparently easy)? Don’t conspirators usually employ other means? Carrier pigeon or some such?

[ADDENDUM: One reason I wanted the timeline for the missing emails is that I suspect that even after Lerner’s computer crashed in June 2011, the emails for the previous six-months were still on the server and could easily have been recovered. Why were they not? Lerner’s email to the IT guy after the crash inquires about missing “documents” rather than emails. Would she, or someone else, not have ordinarily tried to recover the emails as well? Was no attempt made to do so at the time? And if so, why not?:

It was unclear why the IRS did not attempt to recover the emails from backup servers in June 2011, especially since Lerner told an IRS computer technician in a July 2011 email, “There were some documents in the files that are irreplaceable.”

Shawn Henry, the FBI’s former cyber director, said technicians should have been able to retrieve data from the servers around the times the computers crashed.

“If they knew there was a problem in 2011,” said Henry, now president of CrowdStrike, a security technology company, “they could have or should have been able to recover it.”

We also have an IRS policy change in May of 2013:

At the time that Lerner’s computer crashed, IRS policy had been to make copies of all IRS employees’ email inboxes every day and hold them for six months. The agency changed the policy in May 2013 to keep these snapshots for a longer, unspecified amount of time. Had this been the policy in 2011, when at least two of the computer crashes occurred, there likely could have been backups of the lost emails today.

The chief executive for an email-archiving company, Pierre Villeneuve of Jatheon Technologies, said most public and private sector organizations keep emails for several years, not six months, because of financial regulations and inexpensive computer storage.

Gee, I guess the IRS could have done that in the first place. But we can’t expect the IRS to know anything about financial regulations or computer storage, can we?

As for what else occurred in May of 2013 in the IRS scandal that might have prompted the agency to finally change its email-saving policy, plenty. Checking back, I see that I was writing about the topic pretty much on a daily basis during that month, which reflects how enormously the story had heated up during that time. On May 22, Lerner took the Fifth, for example. Interesting that it was that month that the IRS finally decided to keep emails a bit longer than six months.]

Comments

More on the IRS: the timeline, and some questions — 30 Comments

  1. Don’t conspirators usually employ other means? Carrier pigeon or some such?

    That requires skills. You have to realize, Neo, you’re dealing with government goons here. Accountant types, but goons of the gov still.

    Their ability to work at the cutting edge or transfer their expertise beyond their Credentialed PhDs are… insufficient.

    Most people think if they got a degree, they automatically know what they are talking about and the rest of us should bow down and obey. Even if the degree is in a different area of expertise in their field, or not their field to begin with, they think like this.

    They’ll figure out what the difference between practical and theoretical knowledge is soon.

  2. I don’t think there’s anything puzzling – since these people are acting under the belief that they aren’t getting caught, that they are doing the “right” thing, why shouldn’t they “openly” communicate via email?

    Especially with the current administration, why would anyone be afraid of breaking the law, when it actually helps their agenda?

  3. Now this has come to light …

    http://reason.com/blog/2014/06/20/the-irs-had-a-contract-with-an-email-bac

    “The IRS had a contract with email backup service vendor Sonasoft starting in 2005, according to FedSpending.org, which lists the contract as being for “automatic data processing services.” Sonasoft’s motto is “email archiving done right,” and the company lists the IRS as a customer.

    In 2009, Sonasoft even sent out a Tweet advertising its work for the IRS.”

    IRS head that testified Friday said several times that Flax emails aren’t lost … but they haven’t got them congress yet. He said they will be forth coming and not a single congressmen asked … WHEN!

  5. So long as Eric “Justice is not blind, for I am her Eyes” Holder is around, they can feel safe.

    After all, why would Holder hurt them for this?

  6. If you’ll Google “Hard drive MTBF” you’ll find a ton of data on failure rates of hard drives. Typically modern drives are rated between 1 and 1.5 million hours before failure. They are very reliable in the last decade and very seldom do you have a catastrophic failure to the extent that data can’t be recovered. Much more typical is an Operating System corruption that will prohibit you from booting. But in that case the drive can be easily attached to a different computer as a secondary drive and the data is easily recovered.

    I’ve had 40+ years in technical support and the last 20 in computer network and desktop support. I’m not buying for a minute that Lerner had such a failure at such a convenient time.

  8. From Sonasoft.com web page list of customers.

    http://www.sonasoft.com/company/customers/

    “Government

    Abington Police Department

    The Bureau of Engraving and Printing

    California Dept. of Parks and Recreation

    California Public Utility Commission

    City of El Monte

    City of San Jose

    City of Newport Beach

    Cherry Aerospace

    Internal Revenue Services (IRS)

    Juneau Police Department

    Mahoning County

    Pima County, Arizona

    SF Department of Public Works

    South East Texas Reg. Planning Commission

    Township of Middletown New Jersey

    US Army Corps of Engineers

  10. kaba, if you’re not buying that such a catastrophic and unrecoverable but convenient failure could happen to Lerner’s machine, can you buy that this happened 6 other times in short order to the very people with whom Lerner was alleged to be conspiring?

    neo, the post that you linked to yesterday on Ace says the unrecoverable emails were from 2009 – 2011, probably the beginning of 2011. So, the agency’s story and chronology is that her drive crashed in July 2011, just 10 days after the Camp letter, and the server backups would have had emails beginning from 6 months prior to that.

  11. About recovering data from a crashed laptop — over at Ace of Spades, a commenter offers this:

    I’d like to know the IRS’ encryption policies for laptops. It was my understanding that all Gov’t laptops require volume encryption (since a laptop was lost at an airport some years back). I worked for a contractor and all laptops had to have volume encryption due to this “policy”.

    It matters because a single bad sector on an encrypted drive can render 100% of the data irrecoverable. The laptop doesn’t even have to “crash” so much as normal hard drive wear-and-tear and suddenly everything is gone.

    Anyone here who knows this stuff ever hear of this kind of thing?

  12. First, I think Democrat Congressmen and Senators are that brazen to send email to the IRS. Just look at Rep. Cummings’ harassing letter directly to True the Vote. This is not the behavior of someone who thinks he will face legal problems for overstepping. IIRS, they were publicly siccing the IRS on the Tea Party groups.

    Second, I think there has to be something pretty bad for the lost email/destroyed hard drive excuse. White House contact is an obvious guess. However, given that the IRS was in contact with the DoJ for possible prosecution, and the huge IRS data dump provided to the FBI, I’m wondering if they’re hiding coordination with additional agencies. Just look at what happened to True the Vote. Not only were they audited by the IRS (personal and business audits), but they were also targeted by the FBI, ATF, OSHA, and DoJ. There was also confidential IRS information leaked to Pro Publica about conservative groups(and remember the strange quest to nail Romney on his tax return by Harry Reid?). I also recall that Lerner was referring cases to former colleagues at the FEC. That’s a lot of confidential information being unlawfully shared amongst many enforcement and political organizations. Who coordinated this – Lerner? Someone in the White House? Someone on Obama’s campaign or the DNC? Maybe there’s a concern that this would on par with the Snowden bombshell in destroying our trust in the government’s willingness to protect our private information.

  13. reticent,
    Not at all. My odds of winning Power Ball without buying a ticket is the probability we’re talking of here.

    True story:
    I’m retired now but ten months ago the lead attorney for the organization I was supporting dropped her nearly new laptop down a complete flight of concrete stairs. It wasn’t in the case. Virtually everything on that laptop was a loss. LCD, Case, Battery, Keyboard, even a fracture of the mainboard. I was still able to extract her hard drive; and using an adapter attach it to my desktop; and extract all of her data including some very critical files.

    And I’ve been trying to recall but can only bring to mind four catastrophic failures in my twenty years. And only one of those in the last decade. And I’ve worked on thousands and probably tens of thousands of computers during that time.

  14. p.s. neo … the explanation is even more nuanced than that. Even with the ridiculously and intentionally short 6 month server retention policy, emails written prior to 2011 could have been recovered from the backups had the emails remained on the server. But Lerner’s story is that she downloaded those earlier emails to her local computer, and that the IRS system is such that, when copies are downloaded to her hard drive, server copies are deleted to save server resources. This might have been plausible in the 1990’s when drives, imaging technology were expensive, but for the most data-intensive organization in the world with a budget of billions each year for information technology and which expects corporations to routinely retain 10-15x as much? The system could have only been put in place, if it was, for deniability.

  16. Ann, if you read deep into the comments on that thread, someone who seems very knowledgeable completely rebuts that theory. They say only one sector of an encrypted HD would have been unrecoverable.

  17. I had a much longer comment about this in the earlier post, but I really think any troves of emails would be gone by now. They’ve had 3 years to do it after all, and we know they started within 10 days of receiving Camp’s letter. There was a recent slashdot thread on this, and it looks probable to me that the IT geeks may not be able to shed much light on this either. The HDs could have been wiped with easily available software tools by anyone, and then casually thrown into a pile with hundreds of other HDs for routine recycling and destruction. The 6 month server backup retention policy was probably similarly constructed so that sensitive data could be routinely destroyed without alerting anyone in IT to anything being amiss other than “stupid” managerial policy.

    Feigned incompetence by the managers to, as neo has often noted with this administration, to disguise cunning.

  18. jack:

    I found the list in the spam blocker and have released it. I don’t know why it was blocked.

  19. Per Kimberly Strassel:

    She engineered a plant in an audience at a tax conference in May 2013 to drop the bombshell news about targeting . . . . She has subsequently asserted a Fifth Amendment right to silence. . . . Now we learn that her hard drive supposedly defied modernity and suffered total annihilation about 10 days after the Camp letter arrived.

    Per Auric Goldfinger:

    Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

  20. A lot of Americans don’t believe this, because they think we’re like the 9/11 Truthers, connecting dots together that don’t exist.

    A lot of Americans also work for the government, either directly or not, so they have been conditioned to take the government at their word (or else) and are liable to trust government contracts at their word (or else) than to trust a bunch of untrained civilians (the rest of us).

  22. “Why would the emails show anything that implicated the senders, even if they are guilty?

    Incompetence and arrogance have been suggested, and I agree that they factor in.

    But your question presumes this was a full-fledged conspiracy from early on. Everyone was on the same page.
    Instead, the perps may have needed time to “feel out” the other participants and slowly enmesh them in the plot and corrupt psychology of the group.
    Hypothetically, there may have been some that were more reluctant at first. They started with small actions that implicated themselves. Those coordinating the affair may have used these little indiscretions to acclimate others to greater ones.

    Think of the methods of corrupt police forces: the ways they have of marginalizing “good” cops and assimilating others.

    Or, maybe it *was* full-on from the beginning. Who knows?

  23. The IRS cancelled their email back up service with Sonasoft right after Lerner’s computer mysteriously crashed. By law they have to have a back up service and they cancelled it. Does Sonasoft still have the emails till June of 2011 or did the IRS make them destroy them.
    Curiouser and curiouser. And their evil deeds grow.

    Stay tuned

  24. kit, ” By law they have to have a back up service and they cancelled it. ”
    Wonder who got the new contract, since they have to have one with somebody?
    Why would the IRS “have to” destroy old emails permanently, instead of moving them to the new system and then having Sonasoft destroy only their copies?

  25. GrannyAesop, those are good questions.

    Maybe someone at Sonasoft knows something. After a six year relationship with Sonasoft, the IRS abrubtly canceled their contract with them at the end of the fiscal year of Aug 2011, very soon after Lerner was asked for her emails.

    Who is their back up source now?

    You can bet this leads right to Barry Sotero because they are working hard to hide everything.

  27. The first issue with IRS hard drive crashes has to do with the IRS extending the life of the laptops to save money. The IRM says the useful life of a laptop is three years. The IRS has extended it to five. My wife works at the IRS and tells me anecdotally that 3 of the 8 people in her group have suffered hard drive crashes in the past 3 years. Likewise, IT will not replace a hard drive which shows signs of crashing until it actually does so. The cost in lost productivity outweighs the savings by an order of magnatude. There is a real “technical” scandal, but since its not political, it will be ignored.

  28. The IRS has a buget of 1 .8 BILLLION dollars that they suck from US taxpayers. I doubt a higher up like Lois Lerner had an older laptop. Give me a break!

    And all the computers with the damning emails (damning to the IRS and the DOJ and WHite House) all crashed at the same time. What are the odds of that. You can imagine how bad this scandal is for Obama et al if they ratherlook insane and lie with these feeble excuses than have anyone see what they were doing.

    WOW!

  29. Am I reading this wrong and some commenter thinks this is not a political scandal??!!

    Obama weaponizes the IRS and turns it on people who disagree with him and this is not political. They have admitted that they singled out conservative groups. But remember it was “lower eschelon personnel” in Ohio or somewhere who targeted these groups. NO! It was Lerner and her cronies. ANd they kept going to the WHite HOuse to meet with the administration. This was a plot against the American people by guess who.
    ANd the biggest joke is the IRS worried about saving money??? They waste money. That is what the government does best.

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