The Dog Ate Lois Lerner’s Emails! (or something…)
How convenient. The IRS now claims that Lois Lerner’s (the IRS official at the center of the IRS ‘targeting’ scandal) emails—have been wiped out by a “computer crash”… probably somewhere at the Bermuda Triangle.
House Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp wrote in a statement that this loss means “we are conveniently left to believe that Lois Lerner acted alone.”
However, National Review reports, “a growing number of computer professionals are stepping forward to say that none of this makes sense.”
Norman Cillo, a former program manager at Microsoft, stated, “I don’t know of any e-mail administrator [who] doesn’t have at least three ways of getting that mail back. It’s either on the disks or it’s on a TAPE backup someplace on an archive server.”
Bruce Webster,an IT expert with 30 years of experience consulting with dozens of private companies, seconds this opinion: “It would take a catastrophic mechanical failure for Lerner’s drive to suffer actual physical damage, but in any case, the FBI should be able to recover something. And the FBI and the Justice Department know it.”
Of course, the president claims there isn’t a “smidgen of corruption” to be found at the IRS, even though Lerner’s conveniently missing e-mails may suggest otherwise.In fact, a judge or jury may very well be instructed to treat these “lost” emails as if they were deliberate destruction of incriminating evidence.
National Review points out why Lerner’s emails are particularly important:
“Last year’s report by the IRS inspector general set out a timeline of the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups. A full 16 of the 26 non-redacted events in the inspector general’s timeline took place during the period for which all of Lerner’s e-mails were “lost,” and these 16 instances refer to “e-mail” as the source for information on that event. As tax expert Alan Joel points out, much of the context about how the IRS scandal developed and who may have known about it is now “lost” in the black hole the Lerner e-mails are supposed to have been sucked into.”
