There's nothing that creates a "mysterious" hard drive failure like a "mysterious" sledgehammer shot, after all:
Our investigation determined that on Saturday, June 11th, 2011, between 5:00 pm and 7:00 pm, Miss Lerner’s IRS-issued laptop computer stopped communicating with the IRS server system. The IRS server system sends messages out to all of the network-connected computers every two hours. The last communication between Ms. Lerner’s laptop and the server system occurred around 5:00 pm, and at that time, based on consistent network reporting for more than a week, the laptop computer was likely located in Miss Lerner’s office. The laptop failed to respond to the server at 7:00 pm.
On Monday, June 13th, 2011, Miss Lerner reported that she found her computer inoperable when she entered her office, and the malfunction was reported to the IRS Information Technology (IT) staff. The assigned IT specialist determined the hard drive had crashed, and following standard protocol, he placed a new hard drive in Miss Lerner’s laptop. In addition to the hard drive, a Hewlett Packard (HP) contractor replaced the laptop’s keyboard, track pad, heat sink, and fan. When interviewed, both the IRS IT technician and the HP technician reported that they did not note any visible damage to the laptop computer itself. When asked about the possible cause of the hard drive failure, the HP technician opined that heat-related failures are not seen often, and based on the information provided to him, the hard drive more than likely crashed due to an impact of some sort. However, because the HP technician did not examine the hard drive as part of his work on the laptop, it could not be determined why it crashed. [emphasis added]
How conveeeeeeenient, no?
On July 19th, 2011, Miss Lerner requested IRS IT to attempt to recover data from her crashed hard drive because, according to her, she had “personal information” on the drive. The IRS IT management agreed and requested assistance from the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division (IRS-CI). After receiving the hard drive from the IT technician, the IRS-CI technician attempted, but was unsuccessful in recovering data, so he returned the hard drive to the IT depot at the IRS headquarters building for its ultimate destruction. According to the IRS-CI technician, he noted some scoring on the top platter of the drive, and he believed there were additional steps that could have been taken to attempt to recover data. [emphasis added]
Well, it might not have been a sledgehammer shot; it could have been a regular hammer, or a tire iron, or a large stapler, or another laptop. There is no shortage of blunt objects in offices, after all.
But let's continue with that narrative. The first question that comes to the normal mind is, if Double-L didn't smash her own laptop, with the "personal information" on it, who did? And whaddaya know? The IRS is a government agency! So it is housed in government buildings! To which access is supposed to be controlled, monitored, and logged! So it should be easy as cake to determine who entered the building, and Lerner's office, on that Saturday evening, correct?
Nope!:
Attempts were made to determine if anyone entered Miss Lerner’s office prior to the hard drive crash on June 11th, 2011; however, the entry logs that would have recorded any entry into the building were destroyed by the building security vendor after one year of retention, or sometime in 2012. The destruction of the logs after one year falls within the vendor’s standard operating procedures. [emphasis added]
Again, how conveeeeeeenient. Also, apparently, only a one-year retention policy for digitally stored information is not common SOP in most organizations. Who knew?
And here's an interesting development: Some of the "mysteriously lost" Lerner emails were found recently. Why were they found? Because the Treasury Commissariat's inspector-general actually looked for them on backup storage media. "Only" took him a couple of weeks, too. This after John "Department Store Mannequin" Koskinen assured Congress up and down that he and his entire agency were moving heaven, Earth, and everything in between in an unparalleled, all-out effort to locate them.
The intelligence-insulting threshold of IRSgate was passed years ago. We're so far past it and the relevance to anything of this futile investigation that one can not unreasonably ask why Jason Chaffetz's committee is still bothering with it after Darrell Issa left the House Oversight & Government Reform chair mumbling and chuckling to himself.
Maybe 'Pubbies have finally had their fill of being jerked around and humiliated, because they're now talking about broaching the "I" word:
House Republicans investigating the IRS’s targeting of tea-party groups are seriously considering an effort to impeach IRS commissioner John Koskinen or other agency employees for “culpable misdemeanors” pertaining to the destruction of e-mails written by Lois Lerner, the former official at the heart of the scandal. “We’ve briefed the leadership’s counsel, and I think that they’re open to it, but it’s the type of thing where this town is like, ‘oh, that’s not how we do things, it’s not really been used lately,’” a Republican member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee says. “But, quite frankly, we really haven’t had executive branch officials behave this way like we do now.”
Like corrupt, banana republic despots? The hell you say!
What, you thought I meant Barack Obama? C'mon, you know better than that. And Koskinen is creamy white and (allegedly) male, so he's both small fry and fair game.
At this point, getting any scalp out of this criminal conspiracy would count as a stunning triumph.
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