Friday Document Dump: 30,000 IRS Emails Found

 

The midterms are over, the political world is distracted by Obama’s amnesty order, and official Washington has left for the weekend. In other words, a perfect time for the IRS inspector general to quietly note that he may have recovered up to 30,000 “missing” emails sent by Lois Lerner.

His office informed Congress late this afternoon that the information was discovered among the agency’s disaster recovery backup tapes:

“They just said it took them several weeks and some forensic effort to get these emails off these tapes,” a congressional aide told the Washington Examiner.

Committees in the House and Senate are seeking the emails, which they believe could show Lerner was working in concert with Obama administration officials to target conservative and Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status before the 2012 presidential election…

In all, investigators from the inspector general’s office combed through 744 disaster recovery tapes. They are not finished looking.

There are 250 million emails on the tapes that will be reviewed. Officials said it is likely they will find missing emails from other IRS officials who worked under Lerner and who said they suffered computer crashes.

Investigators said the emails could include some overlapping information because it is not clear how many of them are duplicates or were already produced by Lerner to the congressional committees.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee he chairs will be one of the committees that will examine the emails.

“Though it is unclear whether TIGTA has found all of the missing Lois Lerner e-mails, there may be significant information in this discovery,” Issa told the Examiner. “The Oversight Committee will be looking for information about her mindset and who she was communicating with outside the IRS during a critical period of time when the IRS was targeting conservative groups. This discovery also underscores the lack of cooperation Congress has received from the IRS. The agency first failed to disclose the loss to Congress and then tried to declare Lerner’s e-mails gone and lost forever. Once again it appears the IRS hasn’t been straight with Congress and the American people.”

Published in General
Like this post? Want to comment? Join Ricochet’s community of conservatives and be part of the conversation. Join Ricochet for Free.

There are 17 comments.

Become a member to join the conversation. Or sign in if you're already a member.
  1. Roberto Inactive
    Roberto
    @Roberto

    It is almost hypnotic in a way, watching the administration leap and chassé from scandal to scandal. A dance where each partner, one by one,  just runs right into the next and the next and the next; until all are left in one massive squirming pile, while the prima ballerina himself is completely untouched.

    All that is left to do now is take a bow I suppose.

    • #1
  2. douglaswatt25@yahoo.com Member
    douglaswatt25@yahoo.com
    @DougWatt

    They must have decided that they could no longer wait for the release of the grand jury decision in the Ferguson shooting case.

    • #2
  3. blank generation member Inactive
    blank generation member
    @blankgenerationmember

    It took this long to go through them and remove anything incriminating.

    • #3
  4. MJBubba Member
    MJBubba
    @

    blank generation member:It took this long to go through them and remove anything incriminating.

    I don’t trust them either.

    Blame the un-curious media.

    • #4
  5. blank generation member Inactive
    blank generation member
    @blankgenerationmember

    MJBubba:

    blank generation member:It took this long to go through them and remove anything incriminating.

    I don’t trust them either.

    Blame the un-curious media.

    My other thought was that no-one has to actually remove anything.  As it’s on disk just give information with the correct search pattern that only provides what you want to provide.

    • #5
  6. Eeyore Member
    Eeyore
    @Eeyore

    anonymous: That works out to 4.4 E-mails an hour, every day.

    Perhaps 1 email sent to 10 people shows up as 10 emails.

    My cynical self says that there may be a furious phone call to some functionary screaming “You said those emails were gone!!!”

    • #6
  7. Indaba Member
    Indaba
    @

    Bet Louis is having a bad weekend.

    • #7
  8. Stad Coolidge
    Stad
    @Stad

    As Gomer Pyle would say, “Surprise, surprise, sur-PRISE!”

    I had no doubt the e-mails still existed.  Where I work (I’m a Fed) , all e-mails are archived, no matter how trivial.  In addition, there is a Federal program called “Continuity of Operations”, or COOP.  One of the things about COOP is the ability to physically relocate some offices (if necessary), and keep vital government functions going in case of you-name-it.  The ability to re-establish communications, and to rapidly retrieve documents and prior communications (including e-mails) is one of the things COOP requires.

    • #8
  9. PsychLynne Inactive
    PsychLynne
    @PsychLynne

    anonymous:Wow—Lois was a busy little bureaucrat!

    According to the linked article, the recovered E-mails cover a period from 2009 through 2011. If that period spanned the full three years, that would be 10,000 E-mails a year. Now, I consider that I send a lot of E-mail, but sheesh!

    I work at a different federal agency (one of the institutes of NIH) and on a slow day I receive around 60 emails a day, 5 days a week with an additional 25 or so on weekends.  I am not in charge of a branch or program and have no direct reports (except the occasional post-doctoral fellow).

    The culture in our institute is “why walk down to an office when you can send an email”  Also, lots of emails around scheduling meetings in outlook.

    So, I have no trouble believing she had that many at her supervisory level.  How many of them are relevant is another story.

    • #9
  10. user_137118 Member
    user_137118
    @DeanMurphy

    Plus, at any large institution there is the inevitable reply all storm.

    • #10
  11. Michael Collins Member
    Michael Collins
    @MichaelCollins

    I can just imagine the conversation among the investigators:   “The backup tapes?  Why didn’t we think of that before?  This investigation has been going on for over a year and nobody even thought to look at the backup tapes.  Of course, the backup tapes (slapping forehead)! Gee, how could we be so stupid!”

    • #11
  12. Eeyore Member
    Eeyore
    @Eeyore

    Of course, it may be that it took this long to write 2 years worth of plausible, exonerating emails and then “recover” them.

    • #12
  13. user_199279 Coolidge
    user_199279
    @ChrisCampion

    Darrell Issa’s language is too kind regarding the IRS.  The word he wants to use here is “lying”.

    Here are some variations on that in case he needs more help:

    Lie

    Liar

    Prevaricatrix

    Rogue Agent (whoops, wrong word)

    Lying Lie-Bags

    We are paying these idiots hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to run a revenue agency that takes money earned by the citizens and spends it on poet festivals in Utah, and they’re lying to us about what their legal arm is doing to political groups that are out of favor with the current administration.

    In some periods in history, this would be enough to get you not only removed from office, and put in prison, but maybe worse.  I struggle to conceive of a place and time where someone like a James Madison would not only condone behavior, but do literally nothing about it once uncovered.

    Instead, it’s just part of how our world works now.  Which means it isn’t working, it’s not working “for the people”, it’s working for itself – the gov’t has become a means unto its own ends, and we are just the sand in the gears that slows down the Grand March into our futures.

    We are not slaves to the gov’t.  That seems to be how they perceive us, though – we are revenue-generators for the State, and if we vote for the party other than the one that most wants to increase the size, scope, and control of gov’t, we are enemies of the State.

    And we all better get back to work, and keep our mouths shut about how wrong this is, or else.

    • #13
  14. hawk@haakondahl.com Member
    hawk@haakondahl.com
    @BallDiamondBall

    Produce them all — de-dupe by serials. Everything on a server has a serial, especially MS Exchange.
    This recovery of two years’ making is utter BS. This is a day’s work to identify and a week’s work to produce. You stand up a dummy server and restore from these tapes, then search as normal.
    Sight unseen, these mails are almost certainly fraudulent.
    Eyesore is so right he can call his willie a hypotenuse.

    • #14
  15. user_129539 Inactive
    user_129539
    @BrianClendinen

    No is it just called bureaucratic red tape and feet dragging and old technology (I bet). You are suggesting there is a couple of IT professional willing to go to jail for some out of work hack. My thought process is now we will see why she pleaded the fifth.

    • #15
  16. Wes046 Inactive
    Wes046
    @Wes046

    I have relatives who work at the IRS.

    Insiders say TIGTA (totally separate from the Service) is both feared and respected.  If you ever get invited to an offsite office…they just want to know why you did it. You are Toast.

    The take I’m getting on this is it’s:

    “Old line Service Bureaucrats” (30,000) vs “Heavy Handed Politicos” (0).

    Rank&File EEs are quite appalled at this whole damn mess.

    • #16
  17. hawk@haakondahl.com Member
    hawk@haakondahl.com
    @BallDiamondBall

    Wes, those same IT types and scared lackeys just took two years to produce what they should have ready on short notice. They didn’t say they had trouble releasing anything. That starts NOW. This has all supposedly been search time, which is unreasonable. Wa-a-ay out of parameter. They can’t be too scared to fudge but fearless in foot-dragging. Just as in Benghazi, somewhere there is a broken link between the orders given and the actions taken — or one end or the other is lying.
    We will never get to the bottom of this, either. But the outrage theater will be pretty good for a while.

    • #17
Become a member to join the conversation. Or sign in if you're already a member.