IRS unfairly targeting Conservatives (Tea Party groups)

[American Patriot]

DOJ: ‘Now I see why IRS is scared to give up emails’

Posted by gulfdogs on April 17, 2014
Posted in: crime, DNC, GOP, GOV, media. Leave a comment
Key members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform expressed outrage at revelations made in newly released emails showing ex-IRS official Lois Lerner coordinating with the Department of Justice on prosecuting nonprofit groups.


One committee member said the emails prove why the IRS is “scared to give up the rest of Lois Lerner’s emails.” IRS commissioner John Koskinen was recently threatened with contempt for stonewalling the committee’s investigation. Koskinen claimed in a hearing that it could take years to provide the documents requested by Oversight.


“The release of new documents underscores the political nature of IRS Tea Party targeting and the extent to which supposed apolitical officials took direction from elected Democrats,” Oversight chairman Rep. Darrell Issa said in a statement. “These e-mails are part of an overwhelming body of evidence that political pressure from prominent Democrats led to the targeting of Americans for their political beliefs.”


“Now I see why the IRS is scared to give up the rest of Lois Lerner’s emails,” said Oversight Economic Growth subcommittee chairman Rep. Jim Jordan.


“Not only do these e-mails further prove the coordination among the IRS, the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the Justice Department and committee Democrats to target conservatives, they also show that had our committee not requested the Inspector General’s investigation when we did, Eric Holder’s politicized Justice Department would likely have been leveling trumped up criminal charges against Tea Party groups to intimidate them from exercising their Constitutional rights,” Jordan said.


The emails were obtained through a lawsuit filed by the watchdog group Judicial Watch, and were not provided to Oversight, which voted to hold Lerner in contempt of Congress. Lerner’s contempt charge currently awaits a full House floor vote.


http://dailycaller.com/2014/04/16/ov...ive-up-emails/

[Ryan Ruck]

IRS Under Fire: "Vote For Obama" Stickers, Campaign Cheerleading Commonplace

April 9, 2014

Even as the IRS faces growing heat over Lois G. Lerner and the tea party targeting scandal, a government watchdog said Wednesday it’s pursuing cases against three other tax agency employees and offices suspected of illegal political activity in support of President Obama and fellow Democrats.

In one case the Office of Special Counsel, which investigates federal employees who conduct politics on government time, said it was “commonplace” in a Dallas IRS office for employees to have pro-Obama screensavers on their computers, and to have campaign-style buttons and stickers at their office.

In another case, a worker at the tax agency’s customer help line urged taxpayers “to re-elect President Obama in 2012 by repeatedly reciting a chant based on the spelling of his last name,” the Office of Special Counsel said in a statement.

OSC said it is seeking “significant disciplinary action” against that employee.

Another IRS employee in Kentucky has agreed to serve a 14-day suspension for blasting Republicans in a conversation with a taxpayer.

“They’re going to take women back 40 years,” the IRS employee said in a conversation that was recorded. The employee also said that “if you vote for a Republican, the rich are going to get richer and the poor are going to get poorer.”

That employee went on to tell the taxpayer she knew she wasn’t supposed to be voicing her political opinions, and asked the taxpayer not to say anything.

In the Dallas situation, the OSC issued a letter to employees reminding them they aren’t allowed to do anything that would appear to be campaigning.

“Specifically, it was alleged that employees have worn partisan political stickers, buttons, and clothing to work and have displayed partisan political screensavers on their IRS computers. It was alleged that these items expressed support for President Barack Obama,” the OSC said.

The IRS issued a statement saying it couldn’t comment on specifics, but vowing it took complaints of politicking seriously.

“The IRS regularly reminds employees of the Hatch Act guidelines,” the agency said, adding that when reports of potential violations are received, the agency follows “proper procedures and protocols.”

Republicans on Capitol Hill, though, said the report showed an agency “out of control.”

“It’s no surprise that this is coming from the very same agency that targeted Americans based on their political beliefs,” said Rep. Sam Johnson, Texas Republican. “How can the American people trust IRS employees to perform their job duties in good faith?”

The federal Hatch Act prohibits most government employees from conducting politics on government time. OSC is charged with looking into those violations.

The accusations come as the IRS is still facing tough questions from House Republicans over its targeting of conservative groups seeking nonprofit status.

On Wednesday, the House Ways and Means Committee voted to approve a resolution officially referring Ms. Lerner, who headed the tax-exempt division of the IRS during the targeting, to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution. The resolution, which was approved on a party-line 23-14 vote, now goes to the full House for action, presumably next month.

Ms. Lerner’s lawyer, William W. Taylor III, issued a statement Wednesday morning questioning the committee’s plans and calling the timing “odd.”

“We have not heard from the House Ways and Means Committee. Nor has the Committee previously issued a report of its findings,” Mr. Taylor said.

He also said the committee’s referral would be meaningless since the Justice Department is already investigating the IRS over targeting.

“This is just another attempt by Republicans to vilify Ms. Lerner for political gain,” Mr. Taylor said. “Ms. Lerner has done nothing wrong. She did not violate any law or regulation. She did not mislead Congress. She did not interfere with the rights of any organization to a tax exemption. Those are the facts.”

[Ryan Ruck]

New Emails Show Lois Lerner Was in Contact With DOJ About Prosecuting Tax Exempt Groups

April 16, 2014

According to new IRS emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request from Judicial Watch, former head of tax exempt groups at the IRS Lois Lerner was in contact with the Department of Justice in May 2013 about whether tax exempt groups could be criminally prosecuted for "lying" about political activity.

"I got a call today from Richard Pilger Director Elections Crimes Branch at DOJ ... He wanted to know who at IRS the DOJ folk s [sic] could talk to about Sen. Whitehouse idea at the hearing that DOJ could piece together false statement cases about applicants who "lied" on their 1024s --saying they weren't planning on doing political activity, and then turning around and making large visible political expenditures. DOJ is feeling like it needs to respond, but want to talk to the right folks at IRS to see whether there are impediments from our side and what, if any damage this might do to IRS programs. I told him that sounded like we might need several folks from IRS," Lerner wrote in a May 8, 2013 email to former Nikole C. Flax, who was former-Acting IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller's chief of staff.

"I think we should do it – also need to include CI [Criminal Investigation Division], which we can help coordinate. Also, we need to reach out to FEC. Does it make sense to consider including them in this or keep it separate?" Flax responded on May 9, 2013.



After this email exchange, Lerner handed things off to Senior Technical Adviser and Attorney Nancy Marks, who was in charge of setting up a meeting with DOJ.

Just a few short days later on May 10, 2013, Lerner admitted and apologized for the inappropriate targeting of conservative tea party groups during an American Bar Association Conference after answering a planted question. Further according to Judicial Watch, "In an email to an aide responding to a request for information from a Washington Post reporter, Lerner admits that she “can’t confirm that there was anyone on the other side of the political spectrum” who had been targeted by the IRS. She then adds that “The one with the names used were only know [sic] because they have been very loud in the press.”

In other words, only conservative groups were being looked at for criminal prosecution.

Last week news broke that Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings' staff was in contact with Lerner about the conservative group True the Vote, despite denying any contact occurred. In this specific instance of Lerner discussing possible criminal prosecution of tax-exempt groups through DOJ, Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse seems to have been the person to get the ball rolling.

On April 9, 2013 during a Senate Judiciary Hearing, just one month before the targeting scandal broke, Whitehouse asked witnesses from DOJ and the IRS why groups that had possibly "made false statements" about their political activities had not been prosecuted. On March 27, 2013, just days before the hearing took place, Lerner described the purpose for the hearing to IRS staff in an email.

"As I mentioned yesterday -- there are several groups of folks from the FEC world that are pushing tax fraud prosecution for c4s who report they are not conducting political activity when they are (or these folks think they are). One is my ex-boss Larry Noble (former General Counsel at the FEC), who is now president of Americans for Campaign Reform. This is their latest push to shut these down. One IRS prosecution would make an impact and they wouldn't feel so comfortable doing the stuff," she wrote. "So, don't be fooled about how this is being articulated – it is ALL about 501(c)(4) orgs and political activity."

Lerner later acknowledged pursuing prosecutions of these groups would not fit well with the law.

“These new emails show that the day before she broke the news of the IRS scandal, Lois Lerner was talking to a top Obama Justice Department official about whether the DOJ could prosecute the very same organizations that the IRS had already improperly targeted,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement. “The IRS emails show Eric Holder’s Department of Justice is now implicated and conflicted in the IRS scandal. No wonder we had to sue in federal court to get these documents.”

[American Patriot]

Delinquent IRS employees paid bonuses by the agency

By Katie Lobosco @KatieLobosco April 22, 2014: 8:40 PM ET

No one likes the tax man, but paying some badly behaved IRS employees a bonus isn't helping.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney)
The IRS was in damage control mode Tuesday after an audit revealed that it paid bonuses to employees who were in trouble over tax issues themselves.

More than $2.8 million, plus thousands of hours of paid time-off, were doled out over two years to employees who had recently been disciplined for various types of misconduct, according to an audit report. About $1 million of that money was given as bonuses to 1,100 employees who were in trouble over tax related issues.

The tax problems include willful understatement of tax liabilities, late payments and under-reporting of income, according to the report issued by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.
The report says that providing awards to employees who fail to pay taxes "appears to create a conflict with the IRS's charge of ensuring the integrity of the system of tax administration."
Related: Three very different tax bills
Although federal regulations do not require the IRS to consider tax compliance of employees when issuing bonuses, the agency says it will change the policy, as per the audit's suggestion.
"We strive to protect the integrity of the tax system, and we recognize the need for proper personnel policies," the agency said in a statement.

Biggest tax changes you'll see in 2014


Over the past four years, the IRS says it has not issued awards to any executives who were subject to disciplinary action. It is now considering extending that policy to all employees.
The audit report found that the IRS did reduce overall spending on bonuses, fully complying with new federal guidance issued in fiscal year 2011.

[Ryan Ruck]

House Republicans Find 10% Of Tea Party Donors Audited By IRS

May 7, 2014

Despite assurances to the contrary, the IRS didn’t destroy all of the donor lists scooped up in its tea party targeting — and a check of those lists reveals that the tax agency audited 10 percent of those donors, much higher than the audit rate for average Americans, House Republicans revealed Wednesday.

Republicans argue that the Internal Revenue Service still hasn’t come clean about the full extent of its targeting, which swept up dozens of conservative groups.

“The committee uncovered new information indicating that after groups provided the information to the IRS, nearly one in 10 donors were subject to audit,” Rep. Charles W. Boustany Jr., Louisiana Republican and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee’s oversight panel, told IRS Commissioner John Koskinen at a hearing Wednesday.

“The abuse of discretion and audit selection must be identified and stopped,” he said.

Mr. Koskinen didn’t specifically address the accusations during the hearing, and the IRS didn’t respond to a request for comment late Wednesday evening.

The revelation was made on the same day that the House voted on a nonbinding resolution asking the Justice Department to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the IRS targeting.

Investigators last year reported that the IRS singled out tea party and other conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status and gave them special scrutiny, including asking inappropriate questions about their activities and membership. The request for donor lists was among the inappropriate activities.

The IRS initially denied to Congress that it was singling out tea party groups, despite vocal complaints from groups that had their applications delayed for years. But faced with the internal audit, the agency admitted it had been subjecting these groups to special scrutiny.

Still, Obama administration officials deny that the targeting was politically motivated, blaming confusion and a flood of applications from conservative groups after a 2010 Supreme Court ruling opened the door to broader political activity from outside interest groups.

Republicans said 24 conservative groups were asked for their donor lists. The IRS initially told Congress that those lists were destroyed, but when they went through their files they discovered three lists that weren’t destroyed.

Rep. Dave Camp, Michigan Republican and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, asked the IRS to review the names on those lists to see whether any had been audited. The IRS reported back that 10 percent were audited — substantially higher than the average rate of 1 percent of average Americans who are audited each year.

Mr. Boustany said he has asked the Government Accountability Office, Congress‘ chief watchdog, to look at how the IRS Exempt Organizations Division decided whom to audit. He said the GAO review is underway and demanded that Mr. Koskinen offer investigators full cooperation.

“IRS has long insisted that Americans should not worry about political targeting at your agency because the IRS has layers of internal protections to guard against it. But in the course of our investigation, however, we found that Lois Lerner acted in defiance of these internal protections,” Mr. Boustany said.

Ms. Lerner ran the division overseeing nonprofit groups. She has since retired from the IRS but has refused to testify to Congress about her role in the targeting, citing her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

The House voted Wednesday to hold her in contempt of Congress for refusing to talk.

Mr. Koskinen acknowledged that the agency needs to take steps to assure taxpayers that audits are fair and said they look forward to the GAO review. He said the IRS has “significant controls” in place to try to make sure audits are fair.

“Every taxpayer deserves the right to assume that they will be treated fairly no matter what their political beliefs, what organization they belong to, who they voted for in the last election,” he said.

Mr. Koskinen said a “handful” of tea party groups caught up in the targeting are still awaiting approval.

On another matter, the commissioner told the panel that he is taking steps to be able to deny agency bonuses to IRS employees who hadn’t paid their taxes. The agency’s inspector general last month reported that more than 1,000 employees received bonuses within a year of having tax problems.

Mr. Koskinen said he is working with the IRS union to rewrite their agreement so that those employees can’t be paid bonuses.

“Going forward, if someone has been disciplined for failure to comply with the tax code, they will be ineligible for a performance award,” he said.

He also said the agency would try to fire employees who cheat on their taxes.

[American Patriot]

Lerner’s Lost Emails: Republicans Press Obama Administration on Tea Party Scrutiny

• Massimo Calabresi @calabresim

12:11 AM ET

Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner refuses to answer questions as the House Oversight Committee holds a hearing to investigate the extra scrutiny the IRS gave Tea Party and other conservative groups that applied for tax-exempt status, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on May 22, 2013. J. Scott Applewhite—AP

"We are simply not going to accept the IRS claim that these documents are not recoverable," says House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp

On June 13, 2011, a colleague of former IRS official Lois Lerner sent out a blast email of the sort familiar to many office workers: “Lois’ hard drive has crashed on her computer and will be without email,” the message read, according to documents released last week by the IRS. But if computer crashes are common in the modern workplace, this particular one is getting the attention of Congressional investigators looking into Lerner’s role in alleged politically motivated scrutiny of right-wing political organizations by the IRS.

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That’s because in an age where every teenager is taught that sent emails live forever somewhere in the electronic ether, Lerner’s hard-drive crash apparently managed to obliterate all record of her written electronic communications from Jan. 1, 2009, to April 2011 with anyone outside the IRS. That fact, reported Friday by the IRS to Congress, has infuriated Republicans in the Senate and House.
“Today’s admission by the IRS that they cannot produce Lois Lerner’s emails is an outrageous impediment to our investigation,” the Senate Finance Committee’s top Republican Orrin Hatch said in a statement released Friday. “Even more egregious is the fact we are learning about this a full year after our initial request to provide the Committee with any and all documents relating to our investigation,” Hatch said.
Now Hatch and his GOP counterpart in the House, Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp, are demanding even more digging for emails on the Administration’s part. On Monday, Camp wrote President Obama to request any emails Lerner sent to anyone at the White House during the period covered by her hard-drive crash; and he similarly requested any emails she sent to Treasury, Justice, the EPA, the Federal Election Commission and the Occupational Safety & Health Administration.
In the normal course of government business it would be unusual for a midlevel bureaucrat at the IRS would be in touch with the executive office of the President. But then in the normal course of business it would be unusual for a hard-drive crash to wipe all records of emails ever sent from the computer, anywhere.
The IRS explained the developments in its Friday letter to Congress by saying that before 2013 the agency’s policy was to daily back up emails on tapes that were saved for six months and then over-written. Josh Earnest, the incoming White House press secretary, on Monday called speculation of foul play “indicative of the kinds of conspiracy that are propagated around this story.”
Democrats say the GOP’s attempt to find a political motivation in the IRS’s handling of applications for non-profit status from right wing groups is itself a politically motivated enterprise by Republicans seeking to rile up their base ahead of midterm elections. The Democrats point to a May 2013 email from the head of investigations for the IRS inspector general’s office to colleagues finding “there was no indication” that the slow down in processing Tea Party non-profit applications “was politically motivated.”
Republicans are having none of it. Wrote Camp to Obama on Monday: “We are simply not going to accept the IRS claim that these documents are not recoverable. We will demand the President live up to his promise to work “hand in hand” with Congress to get the facts. He can do so by quickly ordering his White House and key agencies to immediately conduct an exhaustive search for all Lois Lerner emails. There needs to be an immediate investigation and forensic audit by an independent special investigator.”

[American Patriot]

Posted on June 16, 2014 by Paul Mirengoff in IRS, Obama Administration Scandals
Lois Lerner’s emails — a former IRS IT specialist’s take

No objective lawyer who has been involved in “eDiscovery” — the discovery during litigation of emails and other electronic documents — will credit the Obama administration’s claim that, by accident, years of Lois Lerner’s emails were irretrievably lost. John explained why here.


Moreover, as Bryan Preston at PJ Media reports, a former IRS IT specialist is equally skeptical. The individual in question worked on the IRS’s contract with Computer Sciences Corporation to modernize the agency’s digital record-keeping system. He finds it difficult to believe that the IRS could have lost two years’ worth of Lois Lerner’s emails.


He notes first that U.S. law, specifically 44 U.S.C. Chapter 33, requires that agencies must notify the Archivist of any records that are destroyed and the reasons for destroying them. In addition, federal regulations establish strict recoverability and redundancy requirements. Disposal of records outside these standards requires permission in writing.


The IRS satisfies these requirements through Microsoft Outlook/Exchange systems, which are backed up using Symantec NetBackup. According to the IT specialist, IRS had some of the best people in the federal government charged with making sure these systems work as intended.


The IT specialist makes short work of IRS’s claim that backup tapes were reused after some short period. He says “the IRS had thousands and thousands of tapes and ‘Virtual Tape Libraries’ (VTL or non-tape backups based on hard drive storage technologies).” Thus, “there was never a reason to reuse tapes.” In any case, the U.S. government has been getting out of the tape backup regime for years.


The former IRS IT specialist concludes:

Those folks would not have had such a short retention period for email unless they had it in writing from the highest levels. It would have made the local IT water cooler gossip if the IRS had screwed up and lost tons of email by accident.

Many are comparing the Obama administration’s claim that Lerner’s emails are irretrievably lost due to inadvertence to the claim that Rosemary Woods accidentally deleted 18 minutes of White House taped recordings. If anything, Team Obama’s claim seems less plausible. At least Ms. Woods was able to stage a demonstration of how, conceivably, Team Nixon’s scenario could have occurred.


And while we’re on the subject of Nixon’s erasure of the 18 minutes, how does the New York Times’ non-stop coverage of that event compare with its coverage of the missing emails? The answer is there’s no comparison because, as Roger Kimball tells us, there was no coverage by the Times of the latter — at least not when the story broke.

[American Patriot]

Here’s how the IRS lost emails from key witness Lois Lerner




By Philip Bump June 16 at 2:07 PM Follow @pbump

On Friday, the Internal Revenue Service informed Congressional investigators that it could not recover two years of emails from Lois Lerner, the former head of the agency's tax-exempt status department. Lerner has been at the center of the investigation into how and why the IRS applied additional scrutiny to the tax-exempt applications of Tea Party-affiliated organizations.


Lerner has refused to testify on the subject, meaning that her emails are one of the only records of what happened in her own words. The IRS has 67,000 emails from or to Lerner that it has or will turn over to investigators, but a large number, from 2009 to 2011, are apparently lost -- a disappearance that quickly triggered skepticism, particularly from Congressional Republicans trying to figure out whether Lerner was acting on orders from Washington.

May 22, 2013 file photo of Lois Lerner. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)



Here's what the IRS says happened. (A quick background on email before we begin. Email moves back and forth between servers. Email sent to IRS.gov goes to the IRS' email server; emails sent from IRS.gov to, say, gmail.com, travel over the internet to Google's email servers. You access your email using an email client, a tool that reads email from the server either directly or by downloading it first. As with everything tech-related, it is actually more complicated than this.)


Prior to the eruption of the IRS controversy last spring, the IRS had a policy of backing up the data on its email server (which runs Microsoft Outlook) every day. It kept a backup of the records for six months on digital tape, according to a letter sent from the IRS to Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). After six months, the IRS would reuse those tapes for newer backups. So when Congressional committees began requesting emails from the agency, its records only went back to late 2012.


The IRS also had two other policies that complicated things. The first was a limit on how big its employees' email inboxes could be. At the IRS, employees could keep 500 megabytes of data on the email server. If the mailbox got too big, email would need to be deleted or moved to a local folder on the user's computer.


Emails considered an "official record" of the IRS couldn't be deleted and, in fact, needed to also have a hard copy filed. Those emails that constitute an official record are ones that are loosely defined under IRS policy as ones that were "[c]reated or received in the transaction of agency business," "appropriate for preservation as evidence of the government's function or activities," or "valuable because of the information they contain". The letter sent to the senators suggests that it was up to the user to determine what emails met those standards. It's not clear if Lerner had any hard copies of important emails.


The effect of the size limit and the need to preserve records is that IRS employees have local copies of emails, particularly important ones. That's the good news. By searching Lerner's computer and those of other employees, the agency was able to compile thousands of emails sent from and to Lerner from 2011 to 2013.



And then the bad news: In 2011, Lerner's computer crashed. She requested that the IRS' information technology division try and recover the data from her hard drive. It was unable to do so, and it appears that individual machines like hers weren't backed up. (The full email chain is at the bottom of this post.)




The IRS was able to recover 24,000 emails that related to Lerner by searching other peoples' email systems and including an "earlier 2011 data collection of Ms. Lerner's email." But the whole set, it seems, is gone. (We asked the IRS for more information about the "earlier 2011 data collection," and will update this post when available.)
At least one change has arrived at the IRS in the wake of the tax-exempt status controversy: The agency now stores its backup tapes for longer than six months.

Philip Bump writes about politics for The Fix. He previously wrote for The Wire, the news blog of The Atlantic magazine. He has contributed to The Daily Beast, The Atlantic, The Daily, and the Huffington Post. Philip is based in New York City.

[American Patriot]

I call bullshit. Big time bullshit.

And then the bad news: In 2011, Lerner's computer crashed. She requested that the IRS' information technology division try and recover the data from her hard drive. It was unable to do so, and it appears that individual machines like hers weren't backed up. (The full email chain is at the bottom of this post.)

I know, for a FACT that our email is not kept on our computers in government agencies. Hasn't been for years.

it's kept on a server. What you get, what you send, what you write, it's all there, backed up and put away for a number of years (usually between 3-5).

Her computer might have crashed but her email will have been stored on a server.


So BULLSHIT.

[American Patriot]

"Any of Ms. Lerner's email that was ONLY stored on the computer's hard drive would have been lost...."

This is why it's bullshit. They are skirting the fact that the data wasn't JUST stored there, if at all, it literally is on another drive somewhere and is being ignored.

[American Patriot]

Posted on June 16, 2014 by John Hinderaker in IRS, Obama Administration Scandals
The Latest on Lois Lerner’s “Lost” Emails, With a Bombshell At the End

The Internal Revenue Service claims, as of last Friday, that two years’ worth of Lois Lerner’s external emails are gone forever. You can read the letter in which the IRS told Senators Hatch and Wyden that Lerner’s external emails from 2009 to 2011, the critical time period for the IRS’s effort to suppress conservative nonprofits, have been lost, here. The letter is signed by Leonard Oursler, National Director for Legislative Affairs. If you keep reading, you eventually will get to the part about Lerner’s emails.


The IRS describes its system for storing emails. As I noted here, emails reside in user accounts on email servers:

The IRS email system runs on Microsoft Outlook. Each of the Outlook email servers are [sic] located at one of three IRS data centers. … For disaster recovery purposes, the IRS does a daily back-up of its email servers. … Prior to May 2013, these backups were retained on tape for six months, and then for cost efficiency, the back-up tapes were released for re-use. In May of last year, the IRS changed its policy and began storing rather than recycling its backup tapes.

Yes, I’ll bet they did! This is almost incredible. But wait, it gets worse. It turns out that each IRS employee, even senior managers like Lois Lerner, have ridiculously little space allotted to them on the un-backed up email servers:

Due to financial and practical considerations, the IRS has limited the total volume of email stored on its server by restricting the amount of email most individual users can keep in an inbox at any given time. …


Currently, the average individual employee’s email box limit is 500 megabytes, which translates to approximately 6,000 emails. … Prior to July 2011, the limit was lower, 150 megabytes or roughly 1,800 emails.

These are absurdly low limits. By way of comparison, the Power Line Gmail account currently contains 12,437 megabytes of material–83 times as much storage as was permitted to an IRS employee before July 2011. A senior employee like Lois Lerner would probably send or receive 1,800 emails in a few weeks at most, thereby exhausting (if the IRS’s account is believed) his or her allotted server capacity. At that point, the IRS reverted to manual document management. Seriously:

If an email user’s box gets close to capacity, the system sends a message to the user noting that soon the mailbox will become unable to send additional messages.

Given the tiny mailbox capacity, this must happen every few days.

When a user needs to create space in his or her email box, the user has the option of either deleting emails (that do not qualify as official records) or moving them out of the active email box (inbox, sent items, deleted items) to an archive. … Archived email is moved off the IRS email server and onto the employee’s hard drive on the employee’s individual computer. As a result, these IRS employees’ emails no longer exist in the active email box of the employee and are not backed-up as part of the daily backup of the email servers. Email moved to a personal archive of an employee exists only on the individual employee’s hard drive.

If this is true, it means that the IRS’s record-keeping is utterly inadequate. It has no systematic record of the decisions made and actions taken by IRS employees. Within six months, all centrally located and accessible email records–which, in today’s world, means more than 90% of the relevant documents–are gone. Records of the agency’s actions exist, after that time–if they exist at all–only on individual desktop or laptop computers, from which they cannot be accessed or reviewed in any efficient way. And forget about hard drive crashes, what happens when an employee gets a new computer, or is replaced by a new employee with his or her own computer? Are emails systematically copied from one computer to another so that the IRS will have a record of what the employee has done, assuming that the employee took the trouble to archive them in the first place? I doubt it.


My opinion of the federal government’s efficiency is not high, but I find it hard to believe that this is really how the IRS manages its records. I am not a tax lawyer, but I assume that any corporation subjected to an IRS audit, or any other kind of government investigation, that had this lousy a system of preserving records would be crucified.


That is all very interesting, but the question remains: did Lois Lerner really lose the only copies of her 2009-2011 emails in a hard drive crash? In its correspondence, the IRS tried to prove the point by attaching an email thread in which the agency’s IT professionals sadly advised Ms. Lerner that they had been unable to recover her missing files.

But if you read to the end of the thread (i.e., the beginning) you see Lerner’s email of July 19, 2011, in which she laments the loss of “personal files” due to her computer’s crash, but never mentions any lost emails. Click to enlarge:






It is remarkable that Lerner does not say: “Oh no! My hard drive crashed, and the IRS’s only copy of two years’ worth of my highly important work has been lost!” No: she is concerned about “my lost personal files,” because “there were some documents in the files that are irreplaceable.” That is a clearly stated and entirely reasonable concern, but it has nothing to do with losing the agency’s only record of two years of work.


If this is the best the IRS can come up with, it has much more explaining to do.

[Malsua]

Now they are reporting that six others involved in the targeting also had drives crash.

This is a coverup. Clearly.

No only are those emails somewhere, there is no way they had 7 hard disk crashes on the just the machines of the people involved in this scam.

Lois Lerner needs to stare at 4 gray walls, 23 hours a day until she decides to come clean. Then she can go to club fed the rest of her days.

[American Patriot]

Mal, you and I both know the government has absolute requirements for the storage of ALL emails in and out of any agency, internally and they track every, single click made on web sites, every answer to an email, they store ALL of this information in mass storage devices off the servers, back ups are stored OFF SITE for disaster recovery purposes, and this whole thing is absolute BullShit.

How they can possibly think the public is stupid enough to believe one, let alone seven harddrive crashes caused loss of all the associated email is beyond me.

We aren't as stupid as all that.

Worse, it appears the IRS is THAT incompetent and should NOT be overseeing the collection of revenue from taxes. IN fact that agency should be immediately shut down and investigate by an outside watchdog group who is NOT beholden to the government for anything.

[American Patriot]

Fox News just hit the nail on the head... this new show (I don't like it much, but I like LOOKING at it.... 4 women, 1 man) said "We know the government stores ALL email on servers, so there's no way they lost it", and "They have the emails, they are LYING" and the last two comments I loved were "The IRS might ACTUALLY be incompetent enough to have lost it, but, the NSA collects email and metadata on every, living human being...."

[American Patriot]

You just can NOT spin stupidity.

WH on Lerner Emails: 'You've Never Heard of a Computer Crashing Before?'

Guy Benson | Jun 17, 2014









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Friendly reminder, America. They think you're stupid:

A top White House official blamed a computer crash for the disappearance of emails from embattled former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner, echoing the explanation the agency gave Congress last week for the two years' worth of missing subpoenaed correspondence. "I think it's entirely reasonable. And it's fact," incoming White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters aboard Air Force One Monday. "You've never heard of a computer crashing before?" he asked. After the IRS informed Congress of the missing emails last Friday, Republican lawmakers have accused the White House of a cover-up. Earnest called those accusations "not at all surprising and not particularly believable," adding 67,000 emails "sent by or received by" Lerner have been offered to Congress.

New sneering, dismissive spokesman, same as the old sneering, dismissive spokesman. The Washington Post offers the IRS' version of how Lerner's emails "disappeared." In short, the agency says its back-up digital tape was scrubbed and re-used every six months, so the 2009-2011 emails were long gone by the time the IRS scandal broke in 2013. The IRS also placed a 500 megabyte data limit on stored emails for each employee, so retained emails beyond that capacity were stored on local computers. And Lerner's crashed in 2011. There are a few problems with this explanation: (1) When her computer went on the fritz, couldn't an IT team have restored at least six months' worth of emails from the yet-to-be recycled digital tape? (2) Also, the IRS had a policy in place requiring all "official record" emails -- basically, any communications related to IRS business -- to be printed out and preserved in hard copy form. The Post writes, "it's not clear if Lerner had any hard copies of important emails." What's unclear to me is how any of this jibes with the IRS commissioner's March testimony that agency emails are "stored in servers." Perhaps he was speaking imprecisely. (3) Even if one accepts the IRS' version of events as 100 percent true, why are members of Congress just finding out about this devastating crash now? Shouldn't the IRS have been transparent about that problem at the outset (more than a year ago), rather than agreeing to turn over emails they knew to be missing? House investigators say they have evidence that IRS officials knew about the "lost" emails as of (at least) this February. The agency's commissioner pledged to comply with Congress' subpoena in March.

Reporter Sharyl Attkisson presents a series of questions to the IRS, some of which were purportedly addressed in the Post piece, with additional queries coming from an attorney representing one of the targeted conservative groups. It's not just Congressional investigators who aren't buying the administration's "who, us?" routine. Mainstream media outlets are ridiculing the IRS' laughable story that a computer crash permanently destroyed almost two years' worth of a powerful bureaucrat's emails. In discussing the claim, CNN asked, "do you believe in the Easter bunny?" and MSNBC's Morning Joe crew called it "ridiculous." A former Information Technology specialist at the IRS agrees (via The PJ Tatler):

A former IRS IT specialist is casting serious doubt on the IRS’ claim to have lost the Lerner emails. “These environments were required by federal regulations to be redundant and recoverable,” the former IRS IT worker says. “The recoverability requirements were put into place for exactly the reasons we see today.” Disposal of records outside the statutory standards requires permission in writing...In the case of the prime contract and record retention, “The IRS IT projects were fully funded and never lacked for resources. To state ‘Backup tapes were reused after some short period’ is a complete joke. The IRS had thousands and thousands of tapes and ‘Virtual Tape Libraries’ (VTL or non-tape backups based on hard drive storage technologies). There was never a reason to reuse tapes.” Indeed, the U.S. government has been getting out of the tape backup regime for years. The former IRS IT worker points to this ExaGrid document from 2011. In the document, ExaGrid discusses its work with the federal government to eliminate tape backups in favor of faster and more secure record retention systems...The former IRS IT worker adds that in his time on the prime contract, “I have worked for many federal agencies and the IRS had some of the best people.”

Now add this development to the mix, and more questions begin to swirl:

Emails of 6 other prominent IRS officials including former CoS Nikole Flax are missing. Hers disappeared mid-December of 2011.
— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) June 17, 2014

Another "crash" of another IRS scandal figure's computer -- also in 2011? Who are the other five? The House Oversight Committee will be seeking answers at upcoming hearings. I'll leave you with this link, which takes you to an IRS website offering useful tips about how long to keep your records in order to avoid criminal penalties. Quote: "Keep all employment tax records for at least 4 years."



UPDATE - This is one of the IRS officials whose emails have also "disappeared:"

Nikole Flax, whose emails the IRS “lost”, sure visited the White House a lot. pic.twitter.com/T7PAp1KSsr
— John Ekdahl (@JohnEkdahl) June 17, 2014

[American Patriot]

Again, ABSOLUTE BULLSHIT.

Even my own stupid, standalone system, that has NOTHING to do with crap like that has a database backup we keep off site, along with a minimum of 5 years worth of logs. (we actually have logs going back almost 20 years to be honest).

The emails are on tape or disk back ups. They are simply lying. If they AREN'T lying about the backups, then they are totally and completely incompetent and SHOULD NOT BE IN CHARGE OF KEEPING TRACK OF PEOPLES' TAXES! EVER!

[American Patriot]

Lies: IRS Also "Lost" Emails of Six Other Really Important Officials Who May Have Targeted Conservatives

Katie Pavlich | Jun 17, 2014












Late last week the IRS told the House Ways and Means Committee, after a year of investigation, that emails belonging to former head of taxpayer organizations Lois Lerner dated between January 2009 and April 2011 have been "lost."


Now, the IRS has announced it can't find emails belonging to six high ranking officials involved in the IRS targeting of conservative and tea party groups. One of those officials is former chief of staff to former Acting Commissioner Steven Miller, Nikole Flax. The "lost" emails fall during the time period when "the Washington, DC office wrote and directed the Cincinnati field office to send abusive questionnaires, including inappropriate demands for donor information, to conservative groups," according to the House Ways and Means Committee. During his time at the IRS, Miller made numerous trips to the White House according to visitor logs.


“It looks like the American people were lied to and the IRS tried to cover-up the fact it conveniently lost key documents in this investigation. The White House promised full cooperation, the Commissioner promised full access to Lois Lerner emails and now the Agency claims it cannot produce those materials and they’ve known for months they couldn’t do this," Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp said about the revelations. “Even when the IRS does admit something, they are not fully honest with us. Despite their attempt to bury the missing Lerner emails on page 15 of a 27 page letter that arrived late Friday, we now know documents from other central figures, like Nikole Flax, are missing. The fact that Ms. Flax was a frequent visitor to the White House and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building only raises more questions. Who was she visiting at the White House and what were they talking about? Was she updating the White House on the targeting or was she getting orders?

These are answers we don’t yet have, because – surprise, surprise – a few computers crashed. Plot lines in Hollywood are more believable than what we are getting from this White House and the IRS."


Not surprisingly, the IRS kept this latest email "loss" from Congress for months. According to Ways and Means "investigators have confirmed that the Agency first knew of the destroyed emails as early as February 2014 – nearly three months prior to newly installed Commissioner John Koskinen telling the Committee the IRS would produce all of Lois Lerner’s emails."

It looks like the American people were lied to & #IRS tried to cover up the fact it conveniently lost key documents in this investigation
— Ways and Means (@WaysandMeansGOP) June 17, 2014

“This entire investigation has been slow-walked by the Administration while they denied any wrongdoing and tried blaming ‘low-level’ workers in Cincinnati – all of which we have proven to be wrong. This entire case started with the White House and top Democrats in the Senate using the bully pulpit to bully law-abiding Americans because they dared to stand up for their own political beliefs. The only way for Democrats to have any credibility on this issue is to immediately give an independent prosecutor full access and full authority to investigate every angle of this case," Camp said.

Ways and Means discovers #IRS kept secret, knew of lost Lerner emails as early as February 2014
— Ways and Means (@WaysandMeansGOP) June 17, 2014

The #IRS's claim that Lerner emails are not recoverable is unacceptable. We demand the President work w/ Congress to get the facts.
— Ways and Means (@WaysandMeansGOP) June 17, 2014

Emails don't get lost. The IRS is lying. IRS officials are currently weighing their options about which lies they are willing to tell, to the American people and Congress, and what the consequences for those lies will be. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen will testify in front of the House Ways and Means Committee next week.

[Ryan Ruck]

I call bullshit. Big time bullshit.



I know, for a FACT that our email is not kept on our computers in government agencies. Hasn't been for years.

it's kept on a server. What you get, what you send, what you write, it's all there, backed up and put away for a number of years (usually between 3-5).

Her computer might have crashed but her email will have been stored on a server.


So BULLSHIT.

This is such a thin veneer of bullshit, they must be getting desperate. I've heard multiple people who have worked in various government IT positions on various talk shows state that emails aren't even exclusively electronic. There are paper copies.

One caller on Levin's show stated that there are all these elaborate backup mechanisms that were put in place due to the Cold War and threat of nuclear war. The government wanted all of this information backed up so that if the Cold War went hot the information would still be available in the aftermath.

So no, nuclear war isn't going to get you off the hook for your tax bill...

Now they are reporting that six others involved in the targeting also had drives crash.

This is a coverup. Clearly.

No only are those emails somewhere, there is no way they had 7 hard disk crashes on the just the machines of the people involved in this scam.

Lois Lerner needs to stare at 4 gray walls, 23 hours a day until she decides to come clean. Then she can go to club fed the rest of her days.

FIFY...

Again, ABSOLUTE BULLSHIT.

Even my own stupid, standalone system, that has NOTHING to do with crap like that has a database backup we keep off site, along with a minimum of 5 years worth of logs. (we actually have logs going back almost 20 years to be honest).

The emails are on tape or disk back ups. They are simply lying. If they AREN'T lying about the backups, then they are totally and completely incompetent and SHOULD NOT BE IN CHARGE OF KEEPING TRACK OF PEOPLES' TAXES! EVER!

Yep, backing up today is ridiculously easy.

I have about 20TB of storage space loaded in 2 Drobos connected to my Home Theater PC. They are combined storage and self contained backup. I just recently got to put mine to the test for the first time 2 weeks ago.

Drobo 1 indicated drive 3 (one of 4 2TB drives) was likely going to fail soon due to S.M.A.R.T. information. The information on that drive was perfectly safe as it's automatically backed up to the other 3. I popped out the bad drive, grabbed a spare 1TB I had sitting around (drives in the Drobo do not need to be matched in any way), and popped it in. Once the Drobo integrated the new drive, I went out and got a new 2TB to replace it. I was even able to use the Drobo the whole time.

No lost data, no down time, no hassle.

The laptop I use doesn't have redundant storage on board but I have a software program that constantly backs up the vital data to one of the Drobos over network. I've had 2 laptop hard drive failures in the last couple years and have lost no data except maybe current browser sessions. All important documents, music, links, etc. have come out intact.

This is no different than the Nixon tapes.

[American Patriot]

No, this is WAY worse than the Nixon tapes. He was pissed off at people, had an "enemies" list. He never did ANYTHING that was as WRONG as what these people are doing.

[American Patriot]

GOP fury after report claims IRS 'recycled' Lerner hard drive

Published June 19, 2014FoxNews.com


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(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)





The top Republican on one of the House committees investigating the IRS targeting scandal reacted furiously late Wednesday to a report that ex-IRS official Lois Lerner's hard drive had been recycled, making it likely that many emails sent to and from Lerner prior to the summer of 2011 will never be recovered.


The Politico report cited two anonymous sources, as well as Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who confirmed that the Senate Finance Committee had been told that the hard drive had been discarded.


"If the IRS truly got rid of evidence in a way that violated the Federal Records Act and ensured the FBI never got a crack at recovering files from an official claiming a Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, this is proof their whole line about 'losing' e-mails in the targeting scandal was just one more attempted deception," House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said in a statement. "Official records, like the e-mails of a prominent official, don't just disappear without a trace unless that was the intention."


Lerner headed the IRS division that processed applications for tax-exempt status. The IRS acknowledged last year that agents had improperly scrutinized applications for tax-exempt status by Tea Party and other conservative groups.


Congressional investigators have been probing the agency for more than a year. However, IRS officials did not inform Congress of the lost emails until June 13.


Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee have charged that the agency knew as early as February that the emails were missing. They have also said that email records of six IRS employees believed to be involved in the scandal in addition to Lerner have not been found.


The missing emails are mainly messages to and from people outside the IRS, including the White House and other major offices and departments.


The IRS was able to recover 24,000 Lerner emails from 2009 to 2011 because Lerner had copied in other IRS employees. The agency said it pieced together the emails from the computers of 83 other IRS employees.