Only CBS Covers IRS Losing Two Years of Lois Lerner Emails -- NewsBusters

[bsteadman]

Only CBS Covers IRS Losing Two Years of Lois Lerner Emails

NewsBusters
Kyle Drennen
6/16/2014

Excerpt:

On Monday, only CBS This Morning reported Friday's stunning revelation that the IRS somehow lost two years worth of emails from Lois Lerner, the official at the center of the agency scandal in which conservative groups were unfairly targeted. At the top of the morning show, co-host Norah O'Donnell wondered: "How did the IRS lose emails in the scandal targeting conservatives after the government spent millions to back up data?"[Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Introducing the later report, fellow co-host Charlie Rose noted: "The Washington Times says congressional Republicans are blasting the IRS for losing some of Lois Lerner's emails.... the controversy that started last year is erupting again." Correspondent Nancy Cordes reported: "Republican lawmakers, as you can imagine, are furious. They say the IRS has been promising to get them these emails for a year, and now suddenly says that Lois Lerner's computer crashed way back in 2011."

Neither NBC's Today nor ABC's Good Morning America bothered to cover the shocking development. However, both broadcasts did manage to find time for full reports on Britain's baby Prince George learning to walk.

On This Morning, Cordes cited the IRS's explanation of the mysterious loss of evidence:

The IRS has turned over some, but on Friday, in a letter to Congress, the IRS said it had determined "that Ms. Lerner's computer crashed in 2011," and that, "any of Ms. Lerner's email that was only stored on that computer's hard drive would have been lost"....House Government Oversight chairman Darrell Issa says the government spends millions every year to back up emails on servers, but the IRS says before May of 2013, "these backups were retained on tape for six months," and then got recycled.

Near the end of the segment, a clip played of Cordes asking Issa: "IRS says they've already turned over something like 67,000 emails to and from Lois Lerner. Isn't that enough?" Issa pushed back: "This is not about what you turn over. It is all about what you don't turn over."

Cordes then concluded her report with more IRS spin suggesting the congressional investigation of the scandal was just a waste of time and money: "The IRS argues 250 employees have been working to give congressional Republicans the material they want, a task that has consumed 120,000 work hours and has cost nearly $10 million."
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View the complete article at:

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/kyle-dr...-lerner-emails

[bsteadman]

Lost Lerner Emails Mirror Nixon's 18 1/2 Minute Gap

Investor's Business Daily
6/16/2014

Excerpt:

Scandal: The IRS descends into criminal enterprise, with word of a 26-month gap of lost emails from the very period it was illegally targeting Tea Party groups. Computer crash? Try obstruction of justice.

Just as the claim that President Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, inadvertently hit the "erase" button instead of "pause" gave impetus to the drive to impeach Nixon, so too should the IRS announcement that it can't find two years of Lois Lerner's emails lead to a criminal investigation of this administration and creation of a select committee.

In April we wrote, "Lois Lerner Should Go To Jail." We think so now more than ever and also that she shouldn't be the only one to be measured for an orange jumpsuit. As in Watergate, this fish rots from the head.

We are reminded how, during his Arizona State University commencement speech in 2009, President Obama noted that ASU had refused to grant him an honorary degree and "joked" that "President (Michael) Crowe and the Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS."

The joke was not funny then and is less funny now. It was a predictor of administration behavior. Lerner's knowledge of and participation in planning to use the IRS as a political weapon, in coordination with the White House, is why she twice invoked the Fifth Amendment in her congressional visits, even as she was cooperating — or is it coordinating? — with Eric Holder's Justice Department.

As Joseph Curl notes in the Washington Times, the Articles of Impeachment against Nixon charged that he "endeavored to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposes not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigation to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner."

Sounds like IRS targeting of the Tea Party to us. The president's defenders have told of rogue agents in Cincinnati and other tales while claiming that the trail doesn't lead to the White House. The missing Lerner emails might show a trail straight into the Oval Office.

A statement from the House Ways and Means Committee after Friday's announcement noted how implausible and convenient it was that the IRS computer crashed and lost Lerner emails from January 2009 to April 2011.

Due to the supposed crash, it said, the agency has only Lerner's emails to and from other IRS staff during this time. The IRS says it can't produce emails "written only to or from Lerner and outside agencies or groups, such as the White House, Treasury, Department of Justice, FEC, or Democrat offices."
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View the complete article at:

http://news.investors.com/ibd-editor...ner-emails.htm

[bsteadman]

Veteran IT Professional Gives Six Reasons Why the IRS’ Claim That It ‘Lost’ Two Years of Lois Lerner’s Emails Is ‘Simply Not Feasible’

The Blaze
Jason Howerton
6/16/2014

Excerpt:

A veteran IT professional tells TheBlaze that the IRS’ claim that the agency lost two years’ worth of former IRS official Lois Lerner’s emails is “simply not feasible.”

On Friday, members of Congress revealed that the IRS would not be able to hand over Lerner’s emails to and from other IRS employees from January 2009 to April 2011, possibly due to a “glitch” or “crash.” Lawmakers were seeking the emails as part of their investigation into the IRS targeting scandal.

Norman Cillo, an Army veteran who worked in intelligence and a former program manager at Microsoft, argued it is very difficult to lose emails for good and laid out six reasons why he believes Congress is “being lied to” about the Lerner emails:

1. I believe the government uses Microsoft Exchange for their email servers. They have built-in exchange mail database redundancy. So, unless they did not follow Microsofts recommendations they are telling a falsehood. You can see by the diagram below that if you have three servers in a DAG you have three copies of the database. ...

2. Every IT organization that I know of has hotswappable disk drives. Every server built since 2000 has them. Meaning that if a single disk goes bad it’s easy to replace. ...

3. ALL Servers use some form of RAID technology. The only way that data can be totally lost (Meaning difficult to bring back) is if more than a single disk goes before the first bad disk is replaced. In the diagram below you can see that its possible to lose a single disk and still keep the data. ...

4. ...

View the complete article at:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014...-not-feasible/

[bsteadman]

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Emails

SteynOnline
Mark Steyn
Steyn on America
6/18/2014

Excerpt:

Lois Lerner demonstrates how she backs-up her emails on a dictaphone borrowed from Kathleen Sebelius' website designer

They're openly sneering at us now. Late on Friday, the Internal Revenue Service revealed that two-and-a-quarter years of Lois Lerner's emails have been "lost". Yesterday the IRS told Congress that it is unable to produce the emails of six other officials involved in the targeting of conservative groups, among them Nicole Flax, the chief of staff to then IRS commissioner Steven Miller.

We now learn that the IRS only retains email on its server for six months. After that, the email exists only on the hard drive of the physical desktop computer of the employee in question. And therefore, if that hard drive crashes, those emails are lost forever.

By the way, do feel free to try that excuse if the IRS asks you to produce any document more than six months old. As I said way back when at the dawn of this investigation, everyone subject to the attentions of this agency should play by Lois Lerner Rules: oh, it'll take me years to produce all that stuff - even if I still have any of it.

Is it just the seven officials in whom Congress is interested whose computers crashed so catastrophically? That would seem statistically improbable. Or is this a more widespread problem and there are hundreds, thousands of IRS employees who've lost years of their emails? And, if that's the case, why has nobody suggested that that policy of only retaining emails on the server for six months needs to be changed, urgently? After all, the IRS isn't shy about telling the citizenry that their own data-retention policies are insufficient. Indeed, Cleta Mitchell (the lawyer representing certain of the targeted groups) says that one of her clients was penalized by the IRS for only retaining emails for a year - ie, twice as long as the IRS server retains them.

Over the weekend, Charles Krauthammer and Peggy Noonan and George Will compared Lois Lerner's missing two-and-a-quarter years to Rose Mary Woods' missing eighteen-and-a-half minutes. President Nixon's secretary - the soi-disant "Fifth Nixon" - died in 2005, and I wrote about her in Mark Steyn's Passing Parade, now available in both autographable print edition and new and expanded eBook edition. Along the way I said this:

Scandals are complicated things. To catch fire with a public disinclined to wade through pages of densely investigative journalism, they need an image—and Rose provided it. She said she'd taken a phone call, in the course of which she'd accidentally kept her foot on the tape machine's pedal and accidentally hit the record button; and even though the phone was a long way from the foot pedal, the explanation could have passed muster if Rose hadn't gamely essayed a visual re-enactment—her limbs extended to the limit across the length of the office, her left hand reaching backward to the phone, her right forward to the record button, one foot straining for the pedal, presumably leaving the other free to snake round the desk and over to the corner to start the Ray Conniff on the eight-track. The big stretch was too much of a stretch for the court, and for the "silent majority," which broke its silence and started guffawing loudly. John Dean called her a "stand-up woman," and she was—if only she'd stayed in that position.

It's different now. There are no buttons, no pedals. One moment, two years' worth of evidence is there on seven IRS desktops. The next, it's vaporized in what appears to be a highly selective series of computer crashes. It's still a stretch, but nobody cares whether you rubes buy it or not. I mean, what are you gonna do, right?

Rose Mary Woods' eighteen-and-a-half minutes lingered on in the cultural consciousness. There is still a Rosemary Award for Worst Open Government Performance, and a while back Arianna Huffington was handing out her own Rose Mary Woods Award for Convenient Technological Incompetence, although The Huffington Post seems in no hurry to revive the honor. Writing about Miss Woods for the first time in many years, I had forgotten what a staple she was - of stand-up routines, sitcoms, humor columns. When she died, the wags at The Washington Post ran an appreciation by Hank Stuever complete with an unexplained "gap" - a chunk of blank white paper in the middle of the article - secure in their confidence that, even after three decades, everyone would get the joke. In defiance of Warhol, Rose Mary was famous for eighteen minutes and twenty-eight seconds: the precise length of the gap. The world's most famous gap. The Post's Tony Kornheiser in a memoir of his father:

'What happened to your teeth, Dad?' I asked softly. There were gaps. Rose Mary Woods gaps.

Johnny Carson:

President Sadat had a belly dancer entertain President Nixon at a state dinner. Mr Nixon was really impressed. He hadn't seen contortions like that since Rose Mary Woods.

You could fill a memorial library with novels set in the Seventies in which she serves as the instant all-purpose cultural allusion. She's there in Rick Moody's The Ice Storm, and Delia Ephron's Hanging Up, and Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone, and Robert Ludlum's Apocalypse Watch ("I figured we had one of those Rose Mary Woods things"). In Samuel Shem's The House of God four generations of a family gather for dinner, and Rose's turn provides fun for young and old:

Spurred on by the news photos of Rose Mary Woods spread-eagled between the foot pedal of her tape recorder and the phone behind her as if awaiting a quick roll in the hay with Nixon, we laughed and chortled together that now, finally, Nixon was going to get his… My brother's four-year-old daughter… was learning to play with her toy phone by picking it up and spread-eagling herself and screaming RO-MARY REACH RO-MARY REACH…

Does anyone think Lois Lerner will rate a barrel-load of novels and parody awards? Most Americans have no idea who she is because, unlike Rose Mary Woods, the media have declined to make her a punchline. On Saturday, Ms Lerner failed to make the front page of The New York Times - or any other page. Emboldened by the acquiescence of the media's court eunuchs, American government is on the move, exiting the First World and heading for banana-republic territory, at quite a clip.

View the complete article at:

http://www.steynonline.com/6426/we-d...stinkin-emails