Discussion for article #225278
HA – this is going to drive those idiots wild. Love it.
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It sure will. It is indeed SOP to destroy a hard drive when it is no longer usable, in order to preclude any possibility that confidential data will be compromised. But I don’t expect people like Daryl Issa to accept that.
A Justice Department lawyer told Walton last week that there was no evidence Lerner intentionally destroyed her hard drive.
And I would seriously doubt that Lerner would have any idea how to destroy a drive so badly that trained technicians were unable to retrieve the data from it. I don’t expect people like Issa to accept that, either.
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Can’t a tea party psychic try and contact the hard drive on the other side?
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The NSA keeps header information on all emails. IF the GOTP wanted to recover the emails, they would subpoena that information from the NSA, and then subpoena the emails from the recipients. But they think they are better served by ginning this up as a scandal.
The desire for the truth is weak in these folks.
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I wouldn’t be surprised if they honestly thought that Lerner herself took a hammer and just smashed it because she knew that hard drive would become an issue 3 years after she smashed it.
I’m expecting Issa to issue a new subpoena demanding every single paper Lerner has ever handled in her life. He already demanded every single email she has written since the late 80s, so demanding every paper she has ever handled isn’t out of the question for that creep.
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I pretty sure this does not satisfy “Inbreds with Theories About the Vote”.
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There are eleven special agents - that is, higher-ranking federal LEP - on this case?!?
Wow. It’s a good thing there aren’t any terrorists, drug cartels, or trafficking rings, or serial killers in the United States.
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If I were conservative, it would drive me wild. Just as it would you if this were the Nixon/Reagan/Bush/Bush administration.
Is it unusual for a hard drive to go belly up? Hardly?
Is it strange that said dead drive would have been destroyed? Not at all.
I have had drives die on me quite a few times, and every time I do everything in my power to delete all of the data and physically destroy the drive, especially if it contained confidential information.
Is it concerning that there was no backup for this drive’s data? Yep, but considering how inefficiently the federal government handles digital data, not all that surprising.
Bottom line: the IT departments within the federal government need a swift kick in the ass, but nothing about the circumstances around the missing email data points to a conspiracy to obstruct the witch hunt, er … investigation.
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Would it though? You might be right, but it’s not a pattern of behavior the way the GWB administration politicized every department in the executive branch. And it’s really not so hard to believe that the emails were actually lost. All of our digital information is ephemeral. I went through a similar circumstance when my employer changed our email system last year. Of course, I’m not a govt official/administrator.
Additionally, based on the information we already know about the so-called scandal, there is no scandal at all (except that blatantly partisan political spending is somehow allowed to be tax exempt at a time when political spending is the highest it has ever been while one party howls constantly about budgets, debt, and the deficit).
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And George W. Bush’s edict protects IRS workers!
Hey Darrell…
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What edict is that?
Ah. It was actually Saint Ronald! My mistake.
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Couple things:
These computers crash. It happens. Given that THIS MONTH is the final expansion of the servicewide rollout of Windows 7–that’s S-E-V-E-N, folks–and MS Office 2010 to the (mostly-refurbished) workstations of the rank-and-file at the IRS, that shouldn’t be too much of a surprise.
Next: You can choose to archive e-mails either on your computer workstation, or on your particular portion of the (intranet-based) common drive. If Lerner did it on her computer, then those e-mails are indeed gone, unless they can reconstruct them from the people who sent and received the TO and FROM her.
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It did happen during the Bush administration though under considerably more suspect circumstances when tens of thousands of emails were erased between Bush administration officials trying to deal the truly scandalous outing of deep undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame. If I remember correctly Issa at that time laughed off the email disappearance as the result of old fashioned computer technology.
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If a drive belonging to Issa’s committee fails, is it destroyed?
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Didn’t Reagan’s staff remove their hard drives and take them with them when Reagan left office? Did Republicans have a problem with that?
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Lerner is a Bush-era appointee. If there is anything going on, it has nothing to do with Obama or his administration and is incidental to the phony “scandal” the Rs are trying to sell.
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Does that mean that the IRS is about to encounter Word 2010 for the first time? Good lord, they are in for a world of hurt.
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