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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @03:16PM
I'll give it a shot.
Ok so the IRS was mandated in law by our congress. However, the congress does not really 'run' the show in most cases they just spend the money. The executive branch runs the 'day to day' tasks mandated by law. The executive branch can also be selective in how it applies the laws (it shouldnt be but it is). It can get away with that as the laws 'on the books' are huge and expansive and obtuse.
So many presidents have used this 'power' to direct their underlings to do things that 'hurt' their opposing party.
In this specific case. It was directed from fairly high up in the executive branch to stick it to the 'republicans' (speculation, but looking that way). Specifically denying tax exempt status to groups by either omission or just denying it outright. It became fairly obvious when it was nearly 1200 (D groups) to 0 (R groups) that had been allowed this status over a 3 year period. It must go up pretty high into the executive branch if they are deleting records. Nixon tried the same thing with watergate.
So also in this specific case the emails tell the tail of who emailed whom and who knew what. Its pretty much a huge scandal as 1 laptop eats itself ok. 7? And the backs are unusable? So either it is straight up incompetence or malice. Unfortunately it is hard to tell from the outside.
You will not see any real traction on the story until December after the elections. As neither party really wants to fight it out before November. The D's will want to paint it as obstructionist. The R's will make it look like the biggest scandal evar!!!1! Both will be jockeying for position for the next presidential elections. Which means around next june/july you will see the story suddenly disappear as both parties desperately try to bury it as it will look bad on both of them.