There is no IRS email scandal.
I've been watching the hearings today with Commissioner Koskinen (brilliant guy, sharp as a tack) and its painfully obvious how technologically ignorant or dishonest Republicans are regarding this whole email thing.
First off, Lerner's email crash happened before she even knew about the "inappropriate targeting" of political groups (both left and right, YES BOTH). The date when Lerner became aware of this has already been established throughout the SIX investigations looking into this matter. The date was 2-3 weeks after the hard drive crash occurred. ALL of Lerner's emails after that time have been provided to all investigating bodies.
Furthermore, tens of thousands of Lerner emails from the 2009-2011 period were recovered because the IRS went and obtained any copies of emails between Lerner and other IRS employees from those other employees email accounts. Additionally, the White House and the Treasury has provided any emails from Lois Lerner during that period, as a side note, the number of emails between Lerner in the White House was a big fat whopping ZERO. And its also the IRS policy that all employees have to print and store paper copies of anything that meets the criteria of being an "official document" and all of those documents filed by Lerner have been provided.
On top of that, the hard drive crash that occurred in 2011 was well documented by the IT people who were assigned to try and recover the data. There is documentation that recovery experts were brought in and worked on attempting to recover this hard drive's data for 3 weeks. There is documentation that Lerner was desperately contacting the IT people regularly during this period inquiring about getting her data back. Keep in mind ALL of this happened before Lerner even knew about the so called targeting.
A few other facts that have came out is that prior to 2008, the IRS only backed up 3 months worth of emails. After that year, the policy changed to 6 months. Its also interesting to note the IRS IT infrastructure is horribly dated. They are still using Windows XP for god sake. And its ridiculous that emails are downloaded onto the client computer instead of permanently stored on a server somewhere. But that's a failure of funding and infrastructure and has been a systemic situation in the IRS for years and years.
Something like 42,000 Lois Lerner emails have been provided. All emails after Lerner's awareness of the practice in question have been provided. There wasn't even a known "crime" to cover up in regard to this hard drive problem.
I may post more on this as I continue to listen to these hearings. But so far, I'm seeing more of a big nothing burger.
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