Ars is reporting someone at the DOJ said they have the Lois Lerner emails in off-site backup tapes.
Unnamed Department of Justice attorneys admitted to an attorney from the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch that backups exist of the e-mail messages of former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner. In a press release on the organization’s website, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said that the DOJ official claimed that accessing the specific e-mails in response to a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch against the IRS would be too difficult, as they were retained in an offsite backup for disaster recovery.
Then the Whitehouse promptly denied this.
An unnamed White House official told The Hill that no new backups had been discovered. "The administration official said that the inspector general is examining whether any data can be recovered from the previously recycled back-up tapes and suggested that could be the cause of the confusion between the government and Judicial Watch," The Hill's Bernie Becker reported.
Isn't government corruption theater fun?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Thursday August 28 2014, @11:41PM
It seems a bad idea for the Whitehouse to immediately deny this. That implies either the WH is willing to lie (or guess), or that it knows a whole heck of a lot about the internal nitty gritty day to day operation of the IRS. Either is bad and it seems a horrendous tactical blunder.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheB on Friday August 29 2014, @02:07AM
They didn't deny it. They found no "NEW" backups. ie they have known about these backups for a while, or the backups are now considered old.