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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @07:06PM
If you can't be bothered to provide a single citation, I can't be bothered to take your claims seriously.
It isn't my job to prove you right.
At this point you'll probably cite a trivial claim like the shill but none of your actually damning accusations, since this story is about to fall off the front page I won't even see that. But you keep right on living in your fantasy world, it gives you something to suckle on.
(Score: 2) by khallow on Friday August 29 2014, @10:45PM
Let's start with my first allegation, "Lois Lerner planted a shill at a news conference in order to release the story in a controlled manner". After googling for "Lerner staged", I got this [usnews.com] as the third link.
To continue:
So we also have motive for doing so. To control release of the information ahead of an Inspector General report which would have announced that the IRS were doing this illegal practice anyway.
Second allegation: "What we do know is that certain non-profit groups associated with political opposition to the Obama administration experienced a period of two years of limbo where they were neither approved or disapproved by cohorts of Lerner, leading up to the 2012 election."
Googling for "irs targeting" [google.com] yields the Wikipedia story [google.com] on the IRS targeting scandal high up the list of search results.
Those bracketed numbers refer to original sources such as the source [nytimes.com] for the allegation that "only 4 were approved".
And notice that last sentence. That backs my assertion that "his effect didn't extend to groups more favorable of Obama which usually were accepted or rejected in a timely manner."
The Wikipedia article goes on to describe a variety of incriminating activities such as Lerner pleading the Fifth (a US amendment that prohibits people from being forced to testify against themselves), lying about the extent of the activity (Lerner originally claimed it was just restricted to some rogue agents in the Cincinnati office, which was later determined to be incorrect), and that Lerner knew of the activities in 2011 long before she issued her staged apology for the affair which kicked off public scrutiny.
And of course, we have the statements: "Further, when Congress requested emails of Lerner and other workers, suddenly those emails were unavailable with the claim being that they were lost in a hard disk crash more than a year prior. We now find that these emails weren't lost, or at least shouldn't have been lost due to hardware error, because there were other backups done of email systems which Lerner used - as expected."
These are cited by the links of the current story.
The Blackberry allegation: "Further, we see that another computer system, Lerner's Blackberry was apparently allowed to be wiped despite knowledge of an ongoing congressional investigation."
Googling for "lerner blackberry" [google.com] yields this Ars Technica story [arstechnica.com].
Incidentally, this is all illegal not just because it's destruction of evidence in an ongoing investigation of an actual crime, but because it violates the Federal Records Act [dailycaller.com].