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Irs Lost More Emails In Tea Party Probe


Gregb

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Lawmakers: IRS lost more emails in tea party probe
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/lawmakers-irs-lost-more-emails-in-tea-party-probe/2014/06/17/f81ca68c-f63b-11e3-afdf-f7ffea8c744a_story.html
 

 

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service has lost more emails connected to the tea party investigation, congressional investigators said Tuesday.

The IRS said last Friday it had lost an untold number of emails when Lois Lerner’s computer crashed in 2011. Lerner used to head the division that handles applications for tax-exempt status.

 

I am flabbergasted that they might get away with this. Emails are not kept on a single computer. There HAS to be backups everywhere.

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The Bush White House lost 22 million e-mails that they claimed were irretrievably lost but were later found, although there are apparently any emails that were deleted are not recoverable, and some claim there are about 5 million of those. There also really aren't any open issues on the IRS investigation anyway, and the actual results of any IRS malfeasance resulted in only one group actually being denied the filing status in question, and that group was Democratically aligned. It's actually quite likely that just as in the Bush case, backups exist or they can be reconstructed from all the places the emails were sent to, so there's a real tempest in a teapot going on here that appears to be cherry picking the facts.

 

The law in question concerning 501© groups is actually a gigantic hole in IRS misapplication of the law that conservative groups actually do not want closed: The law says directly that tax exempt status under this section is for "civic leagues or organizations not organized for profit but operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare" however the IRS has chosen since 1959 to interpret the law by replacing "exclusively" with "primarily" and had a pretty loose interpretation of "primarily" that falls way short of a "majority of time/money." If you're politically connected you can bend the law any way you want.

 

Nonetheless, the fact that we can "lose the e-mail" for official government business is criminal, although I know from experience that the IT budget in most governmental bodies is the first to be cited as "wasteful" and gets cut to the point where it is completely inadequate. Since it's to the advantage of all the directly participating parties to have stuff "get lost," it has a tendency to do so. This is happening with increasing frequency in business too, not so much due to budget but due to the increasing frequency of lawsuits that subpoena email records, Sarbanes-Oxley be damned.

 

 

You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, :phones:

Buffy

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C'mon Buffy.

Theres Nothing to see here, is there??

 

Not a "Smidgen of Corruption" ?

 

You are Obfuscating the reality of the current situation.

 

The IRS was targeting TEA Party groups. The Govt said "No", and Then claimed the 5th, and when records were requested, they somehow lost 2 1/2 years worth of e-mails..

 

M'Kay

 

They Crucified Nixon for the 18 minutes lost on tape. But somehow 7 computer crashes within the IRS sacrificing thousands of e-mails is somehow normal?

I'm sure the NSA has those files..

 

Gimme a break..

Its an Impeachable Offense. Nothing to be trifled with .

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This is very complicated so please bear with me:

 

So unless someone's claiming that Lois Learner had the foresight to conspire to crash her disk two full years before anyone indicated they cared about some evenly applied and obscure law, her super-human powers of prognostication should give her a very successful career on Wall Street.

 

Impeachable? Darrell and his Other Brother Darrell have been trying for over a year to manufacture a link between this "scandal" and the White House that it's become so embarrassing even the Republicans are saying there's no link and as a consequence made sure he didn't get to chair the BENGHAZI!! panel either.

 

Thank you though Rac, for providing yet another data point that folks who watch Fox News know less about what's going on that folks who watch no news at all. I understand from your silence about it that since it wasn't covered by the conservative media that you're sure that there were no missing e-mails from the Bush 43 White House.

 

Personally I would love to see 501c enforced exactly as Congress obviously wrote it: These PACs shouldn't be able to hide their contributors unless their activities are "exclusively for the promotion of social welfare" but what the conservatives want is to hide everything and pay no taxes to boot, something that the IRS was actually doing for them, but no, the Conspiracy Theorists in the Tea Party insisted on finding conspiracy, something that is making folks like Rove and the Koch brothers really really angry about because they're not going to be able to cover their tracks any more.

 

 

Divine right went out with the American Revolution and doesn't belong to the White House aides. What meat do they eat that makes them grow so great? :phones:

Buffy

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My corp, which manages the email for our and our several sister corps, strictly purges – including a pulling and scrubbing the SAN-served, RAIDed storage – hosted emails older than 6 months.

 

We allow (and would be hard-pressed not to) people to archive their emails on their personal storage. If they back that storage up on hosted storage provided for that purpose, it’s backed up for effectively eternity. We don’t back up people’s storage automatically.

 

This policy comes from internal legal advice.

 

I suspect the IRS and much of the US government’s IT has policies based on similar legal advice. So, incredible as it sounds, Lois Lerner’s claims that she lost all of her email when her PC crashed in 2011, is IMPO neither necessarily true or false.

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Just to clarify, there are logs in the possession of the Inspector General obtained from the local IRS office's IT department that show that she reported the crash and loss of data at the time she claimed it crashed. 

 

There are of course conspiracy theorists running around claiming that those logs were falsified.

 

Large organizations mostly now have very involved "Data Retention Policies" that are based on various colliding business operation (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley) and privacy (e.g. HIPAA) laws that fill large binders and require formal training and automation in software. We have several customers who have had us add features to our software to automate these complex procedures. They basically specify what types of information must be saved for X amount of time and must be destroyed after Y amount of time (with hijinks ensuing when X > Y).

 

Government has similar laws surrounding this as well, some specific to the Executive Branch, which many folks in the Bush administration could have been prosecuted for with those several million emails that seem to still be missing (but have not been because it would be a distraction or some such). As mentioned in the article I linked above, the IRS only kept a 6 month rolling back up because obviously that's all that was required.

 

Also, as people switch from POP to Web-based IMAP, increasingly no one is keeping local copies of mail anymore, and big corporations love this because it gives them a way to more reliably enforce their data retention policies and ensure that little data beyond what is absolutely necessary is lying around to be used against them in lawsuits or government prosecutions.

 

 

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well, :phones:

Buffy

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Nobody wants to pin the tail on Obama..

 

When that SOB should be kicked out of office...

 

Anyone who keeps defending his policies ends up looking more like a Douchebag than someone who doesn't want to see the first Black President fail

Edited by Racoon
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The IRS situation just gets thicker and thicker...

 

Despite a 3 Billion dollar Increase in the annual budget since 2010, the IRS somehow loses all the emails from a certain Ms. Lerner.. and claims System Malfuction.

Who coincidently. Lerner pleaded the 5th despite Nothing being wrong to begin with!

 

 

But lest you,  average American Citizen or small business owner,. fudge on a tax return, you can bet the IRS has everything on file . :huh:

 

If you buy what the IRS is telling you, then I have a Bridge to sell to Buffy in New York...

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Oh Raccoon, Raccoon, Raccoon. Mindlessly repeating what you hear on Rush and Fox News doesn't constitute a reasoned argument.

You're basically using the "what do they have to hide?" argument, which is basically an argument that the Fifth Amendment should be removed from the Constitution. Are you really one of those people Rac, who screams about libruls not upholding the Constitution while you want to get rid of half of it?

The reason you take the Fifth--as many have pointed out--is exactly because you don't trust the government, which all your posts seem to agree that you don't. The fact is if you testify truthfully, the government--in this case a loony right-wing lynch mob--may still decide that you've committed perjury and send you to jail for it.

Now I know you won't accept the facts on the loss of the e-mails mentioned previously in this thread, and you've so far seen fit to avoid discussing the facts other than to continue to cast the aspersions that are direct epithet-laden, fact-free quotes from your favorite news "entertainers," so unfortunately this discussion has devolved into this:


post-787-0-11835200-1403809885_thumb.jpg

Click to embiggen.

Source: Get Fuzzy, Darby Conley 6/21/2014

 

Really don't mind if you sit this one out, :phones:

Buffy

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  • 4 months later...

My second post and already am in a flame war.

 

I was glad when Obama got elected but was left disillusioned shortly thereafter.

 

I no longer support him, but in his defense, he is trying like heck to 'do nothing stupid'

 

If only GW did the same.

 

How many E-mails do you think HE lost deciding to go to war over weapons of yada yada?

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