The Latest on Lois Lerner’s
“Lost” Emails, With a Bombshell At the End
Posted on June 16, 2014 by John Hinderaker
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.
Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Outlook is a personal
information manager from Microsoft, available as a part of the Microsoft Office
suite.
Note: William H. Gates
III is a co-founder & technology adviser & director for the Microsoft Corporation, and a co-chair for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Bill
& Melinda Gates Foundation was a funder for the Aspen
Institute (think tank), the International Rescue
Committee, and the Brookings Institution (think tank).
Foundation
to Promote Open Society was a funder for the Aspen Institute (think tank), the International
Rescue Committee, and the Brookings Institution (think tank).
George Soros
was the chairman for the Foundation to
Promote Open Society, and is the founder & chairman for the Open Society Foundations.
Open
Society Foundations was a funder for the Atlantic
Council of the United States
(think tank).
Henrietta
Holsman Fore is a trustee at the Aspen Institute (think
tank), and a member of the Belizean Grove.
Deborah
L. Wince-Smith is a member of the Belizean
Grove, and was a member of the IRS
Oversight Board.
IRS
Oversight Board is a citizen’s board for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
Henry A. Kissinger
was a lifetime trustee at the Aspen Institute
(think tank), is a member of the Bohemian
Club, the founder of Kissinger
Associates, Inc., an overseer at the International Rescue Committee, a director at the Atlantic Council of the United States (think tank),
a director at the American Friends of Bilderberg
(think tank), and a 2008 Bilderberg conference
participant (think tank).
Timothy
F. Geithner was a researcher for Kissinger
Associates, Inc., an overseer at the International Rescue Committee, and the secretary at the U.S. Department of the Treasury for the Barack Obama administration.
Internal
Revenue Service (IRS) is a
division of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
Charles
O. Rossotti was a commissioner
for the Internal
Revenue Service (IRS), is a director at the Atlantic
Council of the United States
(think tank).
William
J. Wilkins is the chief counsel for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for the Barack Obama administration, and was a partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr.
Cameron
F. Kerry was an associate at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, is the U.S. Department of
State secretary John F. Kerry’s
brother, and a fellow at the Brookings
Institution (think tank).
Ann M. Fudge
is a trustee at the Brookings Institution (think tank), and a U.S. program advisory panel chair
for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Bill
& Melinda Gates Foundation was a funder for the Brookings Institution (think tank), and the Aspen Institute (think tank).
William
H. Gates III is a co-chair for the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation, and a co-founder & technology adviser & director
for the Microsoft Corporation.
National
Security Agency (NSA) was a
grant recipient from the Microsoft Corporation.
Booz
Allen Hamilton is a contractor for the National Security Agency
(NSA).
Charles
O. Rossotti is a director at Booz Allen Hamilton,
a director at the Atlantic Council of the United States
(think tank), and was a commissioner for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
IRS
Oversight Board is a citizen’s board for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
Deborah
L. Wince-Smith was a member of the IRS
Oversight Board, and is a member of the Belizean Grove.
Henrietta
Holsman Fore is a member of the Belizean Grove,
and a trustee at the Aspen Institute (think
tank).
Mary
Agnes Wilderotter a member of the Belizean
Grove, and was the SVP for the Microsoft
Corporation.
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