A Snow Storm of EMails

For John, BLUF:  Coverups, all the way down.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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From the Tax Prof Blog we have a link to an Editorial in The Washington Examiner.  It is, after all, Day 989 if the IRS Scandal.

"The dog keeps eating IRS hard drives"

In Oscar Wilde's comedy, "The Importance of Being Earnest," Lady Bracknell is indignant to hear that Jack Worthing is an orphan. "To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."

If only one could enjoy a similar belly laugh over President Obama's IRS repeatedly losing hard drives loaded with data related to scandals at the agency. To lose one might be regarded as suspicious happenstance; to lose two looks like conspiracy.

And it isn't just the IRS.  It appears that DOS wants an added month from the courts for the next dump of EMails from Ms Hillary Clinton.  They are blaming the snow storm.

This is from The [Manchester] Guardian, "Hillary Clinton emails: State Department seeks extension for release".

The US State Department asked a judge on Friday for a one-month extension to finish publicly releasing thousands of emails sent by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state, in part because a winter storm closed government offices.

The department said in a federal court filing it needed until 29 February after realizing this week that it had “overlooked” emails amounting to 7,254 printed pages that it should have already shared with other agencies for them to review for sensitive information.

It said expected heavy snow in Washington DC had interrupted delivery of these emails to other agencies. Many federal offices closed early on Friday afternoon.

They couldn't have used EMail to solve this?  I know DoD is clamping down on the use of EMail (see below), but still, …

As one of my friends noted in an EMail this morning:

Please don't tell me that State is sending over 7,000 pages over to the various agencies to be declass vice scanning and sending over in PDF, as 3 or so gigabytes, or searchable PDF?  Crazy

Well, yes, there is the fact that DoD is putting limits on mail folders.  From The Army Times

“Since February 2015, the number of Defense Enterprise Email mailboxes [with] more than four gigabytes had been increasing at a rate of approximately 4,000 accounts per month,” said John Howell, Army product director for enterprise content collaboration and messaging.

In a time of limited budgets the servers needed for this EMail are too costly and unsustainable.

Yes, the Washington Times Editors have it—"careless" or "conspiracy".

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff