This is the most crooked administration in history.  They are all spin and damage control and lack leadership, accountability and competence. 

For government email, there is supposed to be another backup -- where is that!  And, the other agencies should have copies of their email correspondence.  If, a corporation tried to sell this to a judge, there would be many serving time for contempt of court.

950 days and the bum is out, unless he gets impeached and removed when the good guys take control in November.

I suspect they will leave plenty of evidence to convict later.

what do you think the IRS reaction would be if a serf (taxpayer) tried that excuse?

I am glad to see all the excuses and the non-action the Liberals pooh-poohed as made up scandals because the next President and his administration can use the same excuse and Executive Orders to push their agenda. And I would be willing to be it will not be HaHalliary either. She keeps digging a new hole for herself everyday.

When email is sent, they go thru central servers,  Government is required to retain all those email in the servers and to copy them for storage.  The IRS story isn't believable, period.

I don't know. We just recently found out that the VA is running its systems on software from 1985. Let's not assume that the IRS was any more advanced. LOL

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They may have old software, however, I doubt the hardware is that old. They are not using dial-up to sent and receive email.  I know that for a fact.

As so many have asked, what would the irs do if millons of taxpayers just sent a letter claiming their computers had crashed, making it impossible to do their taxes or pay what's owed? 

If a few thousand, expect harsh treatment. If millions, expect WHINING.

Time to start issuing subpoenas for contempt of congress. Bring them before the House to demand documents. If, not produced, after a vote of inherent contempt, the Sergeant-at-Arms may transport them to the Metro Police jail, until the documents are received.  FYI, congress has sole authority over DC.

Remember this:

Article 2

Using the powers of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in disregard of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights of citizens, impairing the due and proper administration of justice and the conduct of lawful inquiries, or contravening the laws governing agencies of the executive branch and the purposed of these agencies.

This conduct has included one or more of the following:

1. He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavoured to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposed not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be intitiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.
2. He misused the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service, and other executive personnel, in violation or disregard of the constitutional rights of citizens, by directing or authorizing such agencies or personnel to conduct or continue electronic surveillance or other investigations for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office; he did direct, authorize, or permit the use of information obtained thereby for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office; and he did direct the concealment of certain records made by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of electronic surveillance.
3. He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, in violation or disregard of the constitutional rights of citizens, authorized and permitted to be maintained a secret investigative unit within the office of the President, financed in part with money derived from campaign contributions, which unlawfully utilized the resources of the Central Intelligence Agency, engaged in covert and unlawful activities, and attempted to prejudice the constitutional right of an accused to a fair trial.
4. He has failed to take care that the laws were faithfully executed by failing to act when he knew or had reason to know that his close subordinates endeavoured to impede and frustrate lawful inquiries by duly constituted executive, judicial and legislative entities concerning the unlawful entry into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, and the cover-up thereof, and concerning other unlawful activities including those relating to the confirmation of Richard Kleindienst as Attorney General of the United States, the electronic surveillance of private citizens, the break-in into the offices of Dr. Lewis Fielding, and the campaign financing practices of the Committee to Re-elect the President.
5. In disregard of the rule of law, he knowingly misused the executive power by interfering with agencies of the executive branch, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Criminal Division, and the Office of Watergate Special Prosecution Force, of the Department of Justice, and the Central Intelligence Agency, in violation of his duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed  http://watergate.info/impeachm...icles-of-impeachment

What is wrong for one party to do is also wrong for the other. But I forget, dems are special.

For ALL Democrats who are comfortable with Learner's statement that sometimes things just happen given that many emails are missing of key players in the IRS investigation scandal consider the hypocrisy.  

Remember a President named Richard Nixon where there was an 18 minute gap in a White House tape that accidentally got erased?   Remember what happened as a result of that?  There is ample evidence, if not circumstantial, that illegal deeds were done using the IRS as a tool against Tea Party (Conservative) groups and people should go to jail as well as the truth should be found as to just where the instructions originated from.

But this won't happen as there are too many Democrats who are just as comfortable allowing this omission or deletion of emails to go on as if it was a true accident.   Just shows you the level of corruption there is and of there are still those that defend them then add to that the hypocrisy of it all.

A really big dog ate the homework of 6 other IRS employees:

Republican lawmakers reacted incredulously Tuesday, after Internal Revenue Service personnel informed them that some email records from six IRS employees central to a congressional investigation are unavailable. 

The reason? All six of their computers crashed, making their email data unrecoverable. 

Related: Did the IRS Violate the Law on Lerner’s Email?

In a joint statement, Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), the Ways and Means Committee Chairman, and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Charles Boustany Jr. (R-LA) made it clear that they do not accept the agency’s explanation at face value.

“Plot lines in Hollywood are more believable than what we are getting from this White House and the IRS,” the lawmakers said.

http://news.yahoo.com/irs-clai...MQR2dGlkA1ZJUDQ2Nl8x

Obama's IRS has gone from obstructionist incompetents to entering a criminal conspiracy -- complete with a long period to prosecute and longer sentences. Need an independent prosecutor, now.  And, a Republican administration in 2017.

A very bad case of "p***** on our backs and trying to tell us it's raining".

The sad thing is that all the talking heads, and most of America, think that this is unusual for the IRS. It is just another case of business as usual at the IRS. 

The administration will find a conspiracy is a nasty thing to manage -- so many loose ends. The IT people will be subpoenaed.  Civil servants are protective of their careers and pensions. Such, do not make good foils.  They spill the beans. 

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I don't think there's anyone anywhere that doesn't know what the irs is capable of doing, and what they have done, to people. I don't expect this to go anywhere because it's like all other things this administration does. Their answer to every scandal? Don't like it? Too bad.

Congress probes how IRS emails could go missing

WASHINGTON (AP) — Eight federal employees connected to the tea party investigation experienced hard drive crashes, resulting in an unknown number of lost emails, Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen told lawmakers Friday in an unusually tense congressional hearing.

 week ago the IRS acknowledged it could not produce some of the emails of the IRS executive at the center of the probe because her computer crashed in 2011. Koskinen acknowledged to lawmakers that the hard drive was recycled and presumably destroyed.

"I want that hard drive and I want the hard drive of every computer that crashed," said the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich.

Koskinen said the IRS took extra measures to try to retrieve the lost emails. But he was unapologetic about the computer crashes or the period when the IRS advised Congress that emails it had sought were lost.

"I don't think an apology is owed," Koskinen said.

Koskinen says it's not clear whether all eight of the hard drive crashes resulted in lost emails.

Koskinen also said appointment of a special federal prosecutor to investigate the IRS handling of tax-exempt applications would be a "monumental waste of taxpayer funds."

The congressional investigation has been highly politicized because of allegations that the IRS improperly singled out tea party groups seeking tax-exempt status. Friday's hearing was unusually tense, as Camp and other Republicans occasionally interrupted Koskinen and continued to ask other questions before Koskinen had an opportunity to answer.

The senior Democrat on the committee, Rep. Sander Levin of Mich., chided his colleagues that, "Witnesses deserve some respect."

An FBI investigation is ongoing.

The former IRS official at the center of the investigation, Lois Lerner, has invoked her Fifth Amendment right at least nine times to avoid answering lawmakers' questions. Lerner did not learn that IRS staffers were improperly reviewing applications of tea party and other conservative groups for tax-exempt status until weeks after her computer crashed, according to an earlier audit by the Treasury Department inspector general for tax administration.

Lerner's computer crashed sometime around June 13, 2011, according to emails provided to Congress. She first learned about the tea party reviews on June 29, according to the inspector general.

Koskinen told Congress that Lerner's hard drive was unavailable to them because it had been recycled.

The IRS said last week it became aware of the missing emails in February of this year. The IRS did not know whether the other computer crashes have resulted in lost emails as well. It will also not say how often its computers fail and lose data.

The lost emails are raising questions even by the government's records officer. In a June 17 letter to the IRS, Paul Wester Jr. asked the agency to investigate the loss of records and whether any disposal of data was authorized. Wester, the chief records officer at the National Archives and Records Administration, was responding to the IRS' June 13 disclosure of Lerner's lost emails.

Wester's letter did not address the lost records of six other employees that the IRS disclosed that day. Wester said the IRS is required to report its finding within 30 days. Federal agencies are supposed to report destruction of records — whether accidental or intentional — to the National Archives "promptly" after an incident.

The IRS said that after Lerner's computer crashed in June 2011, technicians were not able to retrieve data from her hard drive.

In May, more than two months after the IRS discovered the emails were missing, the IRS assured Camp that it would provide all applications from groups seeking tax-exempt status in 2010 and 2011, including all files, correspondence and internal IRS records related to them. Camp had asked for the records in May 2012.

It's similarly unclear why the IRS didn't attempt to recover the emails from backup servers in June 2011, especially since Lerner told an IRS computer technician in a July 2011 email, "There were some documents in the files that are irreplaceable."

Shawn Henry, the FBI's former cyber director, said technicians should have been able to retrieve data from the servers around the times the computers crashed.

"If they knew there was a problem in 2011," said Henry, now president of CrowdStrike, a security technology company, "they could have or should have been able to recover it."

The IRS told Congress last week that recovering emails has been a challenge because doing so is "a more complex process for the IRS than it is for many private or public organizations."

The IRS was able to find copies of 24,000 Lerner emails from between 2009 and 2011 because Lerner had sent copies to other IRS employees. Overall, the IRS said it was producing 67,000 emails to and from Lerner, covering 2009 to 2013. The agency said it searched for emails of 83 people and spent nearly $10 million to produce hundreds of thousands of documents.

At the time that Lerner's computer crashed, IRS policy had been to make copies of all IRS employees' email inboxes every day and hold them for six months. The agency changed the policy in May 2013 to keep these snapshots for a longer, unspecified amount of time. Had this been the policy in 2011, when at least two of the computer crashes occurred, there likely could have been backups of the lost emails today.

The chief executive for an email-archiving company, Pierre Villeneuve of Jatheon Technologies, said most public and private sector organizations keep emails for several years, not six months, because of financial regulations and inexpensive computer storage.

"To have a large agency like the IRS have a very weak policy for email archiving and retention is quite shocking," Villeneuve said. "If this were a private enterprise and they couldn't produce this information on demand, they'd be in trouble. They'd either be fined or accused of hiding information."

The IRS has said technicians sent Lerner's hard drive to a forensic lab run by the agency's criminal investigations unit. But the information was not recoverable, a technician told her in an Aug. 5, 2011, email.

___

Associated Press writer Stephen Ohlemacher contributed to this rep

Anyone who continues to take up for the IRS in this situation is nothing but a kool-aid drinking simpleton. 

I am not a big church goer or Bible reader but doesn't it say that tax collectors are the worst of the worst?

It also says "render unto caesar", but good luck getting the churches to do that. 

I was simply making the point that the IRS is bad, best. 

________________________________________________

It was more a warning against unfair taxation. In the provinces, like Judea, the tax collectors were contracted, rather than civil servants -- many took more than allowed and kept it for themselves.  The tax collector that Jesus dined with realized his transgressions and returned the funds he took illegally, with interest.  

I got it. Anyone that says you can't get blood out of a turnip has never seen the irs in action. And brother do they squeeze those turnips, unless it is one of those so called tax exempt organizations that don't have to answer for a thing they do. We've never tangled with them thank goodness, but there's no shortage of horror stories about them. Too, the state is no better.

I remember being part of a relatively small group who invented e-mail. We always lost e-mails.

Union project, eh.

That seven hard disks crashed together about 10 days after the first letter requesting emails is beyond fiction.  That the information was not recoverable, that tapes were erased and that the company paid to store the information for ages is completely unbelievable.

for a virus to 'burn through the system' would be believable.. for 10+ systems to crash at once.. not so believable.

What is evident is that there is not only collusion going on with this but that there are people being protected via coverups and far worse activities than ever by the Republicans in the Nixon era.  People ought to go to jail and lose their jobs as well as their pensions over this but there is no doubt that those in power will cover it up and protect those who most likely could fully incriminate higher powers in the actions that took place.  

It's actually no wonder why the media today works hand in hand with attempts to make it a non-story for there are ample Democratic supporters and voters who would just as soon not see the story make the light of day and worse see no wrong in it as long as it's their party doing it rather than the Republicans doing it to them.  Then there would be such an outcry for impeachment and heads to fall that you'd never find another news story in the headlines.  Calling it hypocrisy is mild to what it actually is for such events are criminal and for as many as there are to consider it a non-story it's frightening and sad.

Now, comes information that the IRS has a contract with Sonasoft to archive email for long term storage.  The contract ended about two months after the investigation began.  Where are the archived data?  By law all government entities must store these data.