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'If You Made It Up No One Would Believe It': Lerner Emails Discarded?!


by Fox News Insider // Jun 19 2014 // 11:07am
As seen on America's Newsroom


Republicans are expressing outrage after a new report that a hard drive containing key emails from former top IRS official Lois Lerner was recycled. The Obama administration had previously said that two years worth of Lerner's emails, sought by Republicans for their investigation of the IRS scandal, were lost due to a computer crash.

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Tantaros on Missing Lerner Emails: 'The Worst Admin in the History of America'

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If the hard drive is gone, then Republicans may never know for sure whether there was any communication between the White House and Lerner during the period when conservative groups were being targeted. Jay Carney said yesterday that the White House conducted a search and there was "zero" communication of that nature.
Martha MacCallum discussed the situation with attorney Jay Sekulow, chief counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice. She noted that "if you made it up, no one would believe this story."
Sekulow, who's representing 41 conservative organizations, said his group will continue to pursue those emails, even if Lerner's hard drive is now gone.
"We’ll subpoena every single government agency that Lois Lerner talked to, that’s the Federal Elections Commission, the Department of the Treasury, that’s going to be the Department of Justice and others. She may have lost her e-mails, but people received those e-mails. So the people that received them are going to need to turn them over," said Sekulow, arguing that Lerner has committed crimes.
"I think the IRS has destroyed evidence, that's what I think. Jay Carney can be smug and say 'sorry to disappoint everybody, we don't have an email,' but who believes anything that's coming out of the administration on this issue right now?" he asked.
Sekulow then compared the situation to an ordinary American being audited by the IRS and being asked to produce documents.
"Tell them you'd like to have the receipt, but it got lost in your email and your hard drive crashed and it was recycled, and see if they give you your deduction for that expense."

http://foxnewsinsider.com/2014/06/19...edly-discarded

Watch the full discussion above.
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// Jay Sekulow // IRS // IRS Scandal // Lois Lerner // Lois Lerner emails

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'If You Made It Up No One Would Believe It': Lerner Emails Discarded?!



http://foxnewsinsider.com/2014/06/19...edly-discarded


Boy she is something else...She said "Stuff Happens" to the investigator....Really. This might just get interesting..unless it doesn't, because stuff does happen!!!

JUST LIKE HER SOUL: Lois Lerner’s Hard Drive Has Been Destroyed




Posted on June 19, 2014

Well ain’t this a run of ‘bad luck’? First, she loses her emails regarding how the IRS purposely put the thumbscrews to conservative groups and now … whoopsie daisy … her damn hard-drive got destroyed. This ol’ gal’s had a bad week, eh? Maybe we should send her a Hallmark card?

Ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s crashed hard drive has been recycled, making it likely the lost emails of the lightening rod in the tea party targeting controversy will never be found, according to multiple sources.
“We’ve been informed that the hard drive has been thrown away,” Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, said in a brief hallway interview.
Two additional sources told POLITICO the same late Wednesday, citing IRS officials.
It may just be standard government procedure, but the revelation is significant because some lawmakers and observers thought there was a way that tech experts could revive Lerner’s emails after they were washed away in a computer crash in the summer of 2011. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), for example, subpoenaed her damaged hard drive earlier this week, when he asked for “all hard drives, external drives, thumb drives and computers” and “all electronic communication devices the IRS issued to Lois G. Lerner.”

video at link below
Read more at http://clashdaily.com/2014/06/just-like-soul-lois-lerners-hard-drive-destroyed/#3V6bG65376espuqW.99

Sources: Lois Lerner’s emails likely gone forever

It may be standard government procedure, but the revelation is significant. | Getty
By RACHAEL BADE | 6/18/14 9:59 PM EDT Updated: 6/19/14 3:44 PM EDT

Ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s crashed hard drive has been recycled, making it likely the lost emails of the lightning rod in the tea party targeting controversy will never be found, according to multiple sources.

“We’ve been informed that the hard drive has been thrown away,” Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, said in a brief hallway interview.

Two additional sources told POLITICO the same late Wednesday, citing IRS officials.
(Also on POLITICO: White House hits back in IRS flap)
It may just be standard government procedure, but the revelation is significant because some lawmakers and observers thought there was a way that tech experts could revive Lerner’s emails after they were washed away in a computer crash in the summer of 2011. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), for example, subpoenaed her damaged hard drive earlier this week, when he asked for “all hard drives, external drives, thumb drives and computers” and “all electronic communication devices the IRS issued to Lois G. Lerner.”

“IT experts have weighed in and said yes — we can get those” emails, said Rep. Charles Boustany (R-La.) earlier Wednesday.
The latest news suggests such professionals may never get the chance to try again — and the IRS has even said its criminal investigators who specialize in rebuilding hard drives to recover hidden information from criminals were unable to restore the data back in 2011. But this is only likely to further enrage Republicans, who are fuming over the matter and suspect Washington officials drove the selective scrutiny.
(Also on POLITICO: Boehner: Come clean on IRS emails)

The IRS told congressional investigators on Friday that the emails of Lerner, the former head of the tax exempt division that was found to have singled out conservative groups for additional scrutiny, were lost from 2009 to 2011 in a computer hard drive crash in early summer 2011. IRS chief John Koskinen will face angry Republicans at a hearing on Friday.

The time frame is significant because the tea party targeting began in spring of 2010, and Republicans think if there was a smoking gun connecting the Obama administration to the IRS treatment of conservative groups, it could be found during that period.
“We believe the standard IRS protocol was followed in 2011 for disposing of the broken hard drive. A bad hard drive, like other broken Information Technology equipment, is sent to a recycler as part of our regular process,” an IRS spokesman said in response to a query from POLITICO.

(Also on POLITICO: Issa: IRS has some 'splaining' to do)

On Wednesday, the White House retorted that for the time frame in which Lerner’s emails are missing, there are no direct communications between 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and the now-retired Lerner.

Earlier this week, Ways and Means Republicans said as many as six IRS employees involved in the scandal also lost email in computer crashes, including the former chief of staff for the acting IRS commissioner.

That’s because before May 2013, the IRS backed up emails only for six months on a tape, then recycled the tapes, so they essentially threw out the data. Many agencies do the same, transparency experts say.

(Also on POLITICO: The new oil crisis: Exploding trains)

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, which wrote the May 2013 report that uncovered the practice of IRS workers singling out some applicants for tax breaks with the words “tea party” for added scrutiny, is currently in possession of Lerner’s laptop and her new hard drive, according to an IRS letter.

The IRS has been able to retrieve about 24,000 of Lerner’s emails sent to other IRS employees by recovering them from other agents who received, sent or were copied on the emails.

However, Koskinen has acknowledged that the IRS wouldn’t be able to find emails Lerner sent outside the agency.
Brian Faler contributed to this report.


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Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/0...#ixzz357IxEdQC

Bombshell: We Know The Whereabouts of Lost IRS Emails …


A Congressional inquiry into the targeting of Tea Party and Conservative organizations by the IRS has revealed that thousands of emails from IRS head Lois Lerner and at least six of her subordinates have been lost to history after the hard drive which stored them was reportedly thrown away. The loss of the emails makes it nearly impossible to track down and verify what actually took place and whether or not the Obama administration was directly involved in the harassment of independent groups that didn’t agree with the President’s political platform.

Without the emails their is no accountability, despite the fact that the President Obama has repeatedly claimed that transparency and the rule of law would be touchstones of his Presidency. “Starting today every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information, but those who seek to make it known,” said President Obama at a press conference on the day he took office in January of 2009.

The President’s past statements run contrary to the events playing out on Capitol Hill today, where the IRS has claimed that the emails have been “lost forever.”

Congressman Darrell Issa pointed out the ridiculousness of the claims saying that such records could only disappear because of deliberate destruction.

“Official records, like the e-mails of a prominent official, don’t just disappear without a trace unless that was the intention.”

It turns out that Senator Darrell Issa is right. Records like these don’t just disappear without a trace.

We know the whereabouts of the lost IRS emails and they could likely be accessed and shown to the American public within 24 hours.

It turns out that there just so happens to be a redundant set of digital records available in a facility capable of holding some septillion pages of information (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pages of text) that has been actively aggregating and storing digital data for years.
Access to any of those records can be had with a simple directive from the President of the United States.

The facility where the records are stored, along with the private emails, text messages, google searches and 20 trillion domestic phone calls since 2001 is owned and operated by America’s National Security Agency which, among other things, is responsible for the monitoring of American citizens and storing any and all digital interactions captured on private and public telecommunications lines. The NSA’s most advanced intelligence monitoring facility is located at Camp Williams and is called the “Utah Data Center.”


If the emails ever existed, whether they were deliberately wiped or accidentally lost, the National Security Agency undoubtedly has a digital record of them.

Intelligence officials and law enforcement refer to the phenomenon as “digital permanence” and what it means is that there exists a record of every digital interaction taking place over the internet somewhere. So, even if you happen to lose a hard drive or purposefully click that delete button, you’d be in luck. The National Security Agency has a copy of it because they have been effectively collecting all data sent over telecommunications lines in the United States since at least 2001.

The mind-boggling amount of data being collected at this and other facilities seems like something out of a science fiction movie, but according to award-winning mathematician and NSA whistleblower William Binney it is very real – and it’s been happening for quite some time. And just in case you think they’re collecting “meta-data” such the the sender, receiver and subject line of an email exclusively, according to Binney, they are also collecting the content of the communication as well. That means they know what you texted, said on a phone call, or wrote in an email.

Binney explained that the government is taking the position that it can gather and use any informationabout American citizens living on U.S. soil if it comes from:

Any service provider … any third party … any commercial company – like a telecom or internet service provider, libraries, medical companies – holding data about anyone, any U.S. citizen or anyone else.

The government is gathering everything, including content.

Binney explained – as he has many times before – that the government is storing everything, and creating a searchable database … to be used whenever it wants, for any purpose it wants (even just going after someone it doesn’t like).

Given this revelation from someone who understands the inner workings of NSA signals intelligence and how they collect data, it’s clear that despite the IRS losing the emails in question, there exist exact replicas of them at the NSA.

It should only be a matter of time now before President Obama officially requests that the NSA turn over these records so that he can prove to the American public once and for all that neither he or those in his administration had any knowledge or influence over the IRS targeting of political enemies.

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IRS Official Whose Emails Were "Lost" Visited White House More Than 30 Times http://ow.ly/2IzZIc


Katie Pavlich - IRS Official Whose Emails Were "Lost" Visited White House More Than 30 Times
Townhall

'Nobody Believes You': Ryan Blasts IRS Head Over Lost Emails






by Fox News Insider // Jun 20 2014 // 10:52am


Some fireworks on Capitol Hill this morning as furious Republicans are calling out IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. Lawmakers are outraged after learning a week ago that many of former IRS official Lois Lerner's emails from a two-year period supposedly have disappeared.


New claims have surfaced that Lerner's hard drive was destroyed and emails from several other officials also have gone missing. Koskinen got the hearing off to a contentious start (video below) by telling House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) that he doesn't feel an apology is owed for the lost emails.
Camp had challenged Koskinen about why he did not apologize in his opening statement.
Later, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) went off on Koskinen, telling him simply "nobody believes you." He called out Koskinen for "burying" the disclosure about Lerner's lost emails in a 27-page letter to the Senate.
"You told us in May you were going to give us all of Lois Lerner's emails and you learned in February that [the computer] crashed," said Ryan. Koskinen denied that he knew about it in February.
"I have a long career. That's the first time anybody has said that they do not believe me," said Koskinen.
"I don't believe you," Ryan answered.
"That's fine. We can have a disagreement. I'm willing to stand on our record," said Koskinen, denying that the information about the emails was "buried" in the letter.
Afterward, Steve Hayes told Bill Hemmer he had never seen Ryan get that angry. Watch the exchange above.





video at link below

http://foxnewsinsider.com/2014/06/20...-lerner-emails

“Dog Ate My Tax Receipts Act” Allows Taxpayers To Use The Same Excuses As The IRS

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16 hours ago


As we’ve seen, it seems that laws in this nation are applicable to anyone but the government during recent days. Seeing the pathetic excuses put forth by the IRS to cover up their blatantly purposeful actions, one Republican has come forward with a “dog at my tax receipts act” that allows for citizens to use the same justification that the IRS does.
I mean, could you imagine how far you’d get with these excuses if you owed the IRS money?
Well, in order to fix the one sided hypocrisy of it all House Representative Steve Stockman has come forward with quite the funny solution. According to Stockman, “The United States was founded on the belief government is subservient and accountable to the people. Taxpayers shouldn’t be expected to follow laws the Obama administration refuses to follow themselves. Taxpayers should be allowed to offer the same flimsy, obviously made-up excuses the Obama administration uses.”
So, in order to remedy this little predicament, Stockman explains:

Taxpayers who do not produce documents for the Internal Revenue Service will be able to offer a variety of dubious excuses under legislation introduced by Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX 36) a week after the IRS offered an incredibly dubious excuse for its failure to turn documents over to House investigators.

Seems simple enough, right? Simply pick just one of the allowed excuses below and you’re all set to go:

1. The dog ate my tax receipts
2. Convenient, unexplained, miscellaneous computer malfunction
3. Traded documents for five terrorists
4. Burned for warmth while lost in the Yukon
5. Left on table in Hillary’s Book Room
6. Received water damage in the trunk of Ted Kennedy’s car
7. Forgot in gun case sold to Mexican drug lords
8. Forced to recycle by municipal Green Czar
9. Was short on toilet paper while camping
10. At this point, what difference does it make?

So what do you guys think – how well would this go over with the IRS? Seems a bit hypocritical, doesn’t it? Let us know your thoughts on Stockman’s remedy by leaving us a comment below.
H/T: Mr. Conservative

http://tellmenow.com/2014/06/dog-ate...es-as-the-irs/

IRS Commissioner Says Emails Aren't Official Records, IRS Handbook Disagrees

Guy Benson | Jun 21, 2014








What were the biggest take-aways from yesterday's Congressional hearings featuring IRS Commissioner John Koskinen?

(1) He said that his agency does not owe Congress any apology whatsoever, risibly citing the fact that the IRS hasn't lost a single email since the current investigation began. "Every email has been preserved that we have," he said. Those emails that they don't have because of supposed irreparable crashes, um, have not been preserved. As a reminder, the IRS says an undetermined number of Lois Lerner's emails between 2009 and spring 2011 were permanently deleted by a hard drive crash. That crash happened to occur ten days after Republicans in Congress first started asking questions about the targeting of conservative groups. IRS officials repeatedly denied that any such targeting was taking place, which wasn't true. They finally admitted to it right before an Inspector General report confirming the wrongful abuse was set to be released. Even then, they blamed the practice on rogue agents in a local office -- which also was not true. Then they tried to claim that liberal groups were also targeted, another gross distortion. Koskinen testified in March that the IRS would fully comply with Congressional subpoenas seeking Lois Lerner's email, a requirement on which they'd dragged their feet for months. The agency didn't decide to mention that many of those emails had "disappeared" until mid-June -- and didn't admit that other relevant officials' emails had vanished until they were asked…this past Monday. That self-evident obfuscation was the jumping off point of Paul Ryan's much-linked rant. Several journalists have noted that Koskinen's timeline about when he and the IRS first learned about the missing emails has shifted in recent days, which isn't suspicious at all. Nevertheless, the IRS' imperious chief bureaucrat would like everyone to know that they shouldn't be expecting any apologies.

(2) Committee Democrats beclowned themselves throughout the session, playing obsequious defense for the IRS, and chasing the discussion down wild rabbit holes -- including multiple invocations of this garbage story. Here's a montage of their lavish praise of the IRS, including embarrassing apologies to Koskinen for being subjected to a difficult hearing. This level of tone-deafness could not go un-remarked upon:

Guy Benson @guypbenson Follow
Brilliant political optics by Dems…defending, apologizing to (!), and praising the #IRS, which is widely beloved by the public.
7:59 AM - 20 Jun 2014

Several Democrats declared that one of the most important lessons in all of this is that the IRS needs more funding, with one member creatively roping in the 2013 government shutdown (which surely had a major impact on the abusive targeting that began in 2010, and Lerner's 2011 hard drive crash). The White House, for its part, derided the entire event as an exercise in "conspiracy" theorizing. Of course.

(3) One of the points we've been raising all week is that the IRS' explanation for the lost emails rests on an admission that they failed to comply with their own internal regulations, which were written to comply with federal law. They say Lerner's hard drive contained the only records of her emails from the missing time period, that it melted down, and that it was then discarded (which they're quick to point out is standard protocol). But it was also required protocol to back up official communications virtually and in hard copy, which the agency obviously failed to do -- if their story holds water, that is. Commissioner Koskinen attempted to defuse this point by asserting that not all IRS emails are technically official records that are subject to retention guidelines. Ed Morrissey pointed to plenty of precedent that suggests otherwise, before unearthing this gem from…the IRS' own manual:

Email messages are official documents and should reflect this perspective. Email communications can be offered as evidence in court and can be legally binding. Before sending an email, you must consider how it reflects on the Service’s image and take into account privacy, records management, and security factors. … The Federal Records Act applies to email records just as it does to records you create using other media. Emails are records when they are: Created or received in the transaction of agency business, Appropriate for preservation as evidence of the government’s function and activities, or Valuable because of the information they contain…

Oops. Does Mr. Koskinen care to revisit his testimony? Lord knows he won't apologize. Oh, and why was the White House made aware of the missing emails weeks before Congressional investigators? On second thought, stop asking questions and thinking critically, conspiracy-minded paranoiacs. I'll leave you with this:

Morgen @morgenr Follow The IRS is listed as a customer of Sonasoft software - "Email Archiving Done Right" http://www.sonasoft.com/company/customers/ …
10:06 AM - 20 Jun 2014



http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2014/06/21/irs-commissioner-says-emails-arent-official-records--irs-handbook-disagrees-n1854045

WELL BLOW ME DOWN: Lerner’s Hard Drive “Crashed” 10 Days After 1st Inquiry About Targeting Conservatives

WELL BLOW ME DOWN: Lerner’s Hard Drive “Crashed” 10 Days After 1st Inquiry About Targeting Conservatives





Posted on June 21, 2014
Did anyone involved in this actually think that this would go over smoothly? Here is the timeline of the IRS hard drive fiasco:

The timing is not merely suspicious, it is damning.
[T]he alleged disappearance of Ms. Lerner’s hard drive—and the fact that the missing conversations are those the former IRS director had with people outside the IRS—has suddenly resurrected, with force, the explosive possibility that she was chatting with Democrats who mattered.There’s plenty of reason to believe she was. Just last week Congress discovered (via a subpoena to the Justice Department) emails showing that Ms. Lerner had conversations with Justice prosecutors about investigating conservative nonprofits. Who else in the Obama administration was Ms. Lerner talking to?
I’m omitting all of the correspondence between Lerner and Congressional Democrats — but check the piece to refresh your memory.
Here’s the chronology of this “crash:”
As to Ms. Lerner’s behavior, consider that House Ways & Means Chairman Dave Camp first sent a letter asking if the IRS was engaged in targeting in June, 2011. Ms. Lerner denied it. She engineered a plant in an audience at a tax conference in May 2013 to drop the bombshell news about targeting (maybe hoping nobody would notice?). She has subsequently asserted a Fifth Amendment right to silence in front of the only people actually investigating the affair, Congress. Now we learn that her hard drive supposedly defied modernity and suffered total annihilation about 10 days after the Camp letter arrived.Is there something in those lost emails? The fact that they are “lost” at all probably answers that question.
This isn’t the only issue of suspicious timing in BOLOGate. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen knew in February that Lois Lerner’s hard drive had “crashed” — but did not inform Congress until last week.
Read more: ACE

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