Computer Problems at IRS

For John, BLUF:  Send Ms Lois Lerner to where we sent I Lewis Libby.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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We talked about this yesterday.  The IRS has lost a bunch of Ms Lois Lerner's EMails.

Today we have a short and not very informative article in The Boston Globe, "E-mails sought in IRS probe lost, agency says".  This happened years ago, but only on Friday was it announced.  Here is a possible reason they are really gone:

The IRS explains in the letter that it has not always backed up all employee emails due to the cost the agency would incur for allowing 90,000 employees to store their information on the IRS’s internal system.

Currently, IRS employees have the capacity to store about 6,000 emails in their active Outlook email boxes, which are saved on the IRS centralized network. But the letter and background document sent to the Hill Friday said they could only store about 1,800 emails in their active folders prior to July 2011.

When their inboxes were full, IRS employees had to make room by either deleting emails or archiving them on their personal computers. Archived data were not stored by the IRS but by the individual.

Such archived emails on Lerner’s computer were what were lost when her computer crashed.

“Any of Ms. Lerner’s email that was only stored on that computer’s hard drive would have been lost when the hard drive crashed and could not be recovered,” the letter reads.

This is The Politico, not The Boston Globe. So, while this description seems plausible, if accepted it requires an indictment of IRS management for exempting itself from the rules that apply to the rest of us.  Indictment, as into the legal hopper.  Issues of public integrity.  Is that what the DOJ Public Integrity Section is for?  Wasn't current Attorney General Eric Holder an attorney in the Public Integrity Section for his first twelve years as a lawyer?

However, not everyone wants to see this overall issue fall into the Public Integrity Section of DOJ.  Law Professor Ann Althouse wants a Special Prosecutor. 

For decades the received wisdom has been it's not the crime, it's the coverup. And here we see evidence of a coverup. What kind of crime must there be that after all these years of warnings that it's the coverup that will get you, we've got a glaring, egregious coverup?!

Her BOLD, not mine.  Even if this was just a mistake, we need someone outside the circle to look into it and agree.  Someone "independent".

Here are some comments at the Althouse Blog:

At 0904 John Henry noted:
Forget just now who it was but a Congressman or Senator said that NSA should provide the metadata.

At 0909 Meade asked:
Can we hire Edward Snowden to find the missing emails?

At 00921 Tom Gallagher says:
It's nice to know the people who manage these bureaucracies will be looking after our health care.

To that last comment, I would note that this IRS EMail situation is just like the VA scheduling situation.  It is Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition (FUBAR).  That is one reason why concentrations of power is so dangerous.  The other reason, of course is malicious people doing malicious things (There is "Hanlon's Razor, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity").

Is there some third explanation here, which is neither malice nor stupidity?

Regards  —  Cliff