Hard Drive Containing Ex-IRS Official Lois Lerner’s Emails Reportedly Destroyed. Were There Server Backups?

You can probably quit holding out any
hope that additional recovery efforts might retrieve some of the
missing emails from former Internal Revenue Service (IRS) official
Lois Lerner’s hard drive: The drive, which the IRS says crashed in
2011, just days after Republicans began investigating the tax
agency’s scrutiny of conservative non-profits, was apparently
thrown away.

House Oversight Committee Darrell Issa subpoenaed the hard drive
earlier this week, but he’s not likely to get it. Multiple sources
tell Politico that the IRS has indicated that
the drive was destroyed.

Congressional investigators are interested in the drive because
the IRS says that it contained archives of Lois Lerner’s email
correspondence; without the drive, the agency claims it cannot
produce emails between Lerner and outside groups or agencies.
Lerner was the head of the agency’s tax-exempt division, and she is
at the center of investigation, but she has repeatedly declined to
answer congressional questions about the IRS scrutiny of
conservative groups, citing her Fifth Amendment right to avoid
self-incrimination.

If the crashed hard drive had the only copies of Lerner’s email,
then those communications are likely gone forever.

But is the hard drive really the only place those emails would
have been stored? Records-retention protocols released by the IRS
indicate that before May of last year, employee inboxes were
limited, external backup tapes kept only six months of data and
were then recycled, and that, as a result, there was no centralized
backup of email. Employees were individually responsible for
preserving much of their own email correspondence.

Yet just a few months ago, current IRS Commissioner John
Koskinen—who promised to cooperate fully with the
investigation—indicated in a congressional hearing that the emails
were not stored on individual computers, but “taken off and stored
in servers.”
Via Townhall’s Guy Benson, here’s the relevant exchange between
Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and Koskinen:

Chaffetz: What email system do you use there at the IRS?

Koskinen: What email system do we use?

Chaffetz: Yeah, is it Outlook, or…

Koskinen: Yes, we have actually Microsoft — or at least I have
— Microsoft Outlook.

Chaffetz: So you go on there, and you want to find all of the
items you sent under your name, how long would that take?

Koskinen: Well it’d take awhile because they’re not all on my
computer. They’re all stored somewhere….

[Some discussion about how long it might take to collect
emails with Lerner’s address.]

Chaffetz: That’s [part] of the brilliance of the email system.
You go in and you check the ‘sent’ box, and the inbox, and you
suddenly have all of the emails, correct?

Koskinen: Right. They get taken off and stored in
servers…

Watch the full clip at the bottom of the post.

It’s of course possible that Koskinen, who is not a tech
staffer, just didn’t understand the specifics of the IRS backup
protocols, and didn’t know that emails were only stored centrally
for a short period of time.

But if Koskinen, who was being questioned about the agency’s
compliance with documents requests and surely had to have been
briefed on the agency’s efforts to gather documents up to that
point, was correct when he said that the emails are taken off
individual desktops and “stored in servers,” then Lerner’s hard
drive shouldn’t be necessary.

It’s also worth asking what Kosinen knew about the destroyed
drives and lost emails when he was speaking before Congress: The
hearing occurred in March—but according to the House Ways and Means
Committee, the agency has known about the crash since at least
February, but held off on telling House investigators.

Lerner isn’t the only IRS official whose communications have
gone missing thanks to convenient computer troubles. According to
the House Ways and Means Committee, the agency says it cannot
produce some records for six more employees, including Nicole Flax,
a regular visitor to the White House and former chief of staff in
the IRS commissioner’s office. Flax’s communications were also
apparently lost due to hard drive failures. If there are still
email records “stored in servers,” as Koskinen says, then it would
be nice to have them.