◼ Republican lawmakers have pressed the IRS to tell the full story ever since the agency first admitted to targeting conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. - t. Becket Adams/Washington Examiner
An overwhelming majority of Americans don't believe emails crucial to the investigation were "lost" in a hard drive crash.
But many Democrats have taken to heart President Obama's assertion that there's "not even a smidgen of corruption" in what they've taken to calling a "phony scandal," and have offered loud and persistent defenses of the IRS, arguing that the federal agency needs to be better funded and free from tough congressional scrutiny....
◼ Then: Meet The Seven IRS Employees Whose Computers ‘Crashed’
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is currently claiming that seven different IRS officials experienced computer crashes that erased their emails and made it impossible for the IRS to cooperate with congressional investigations into the IRS targeting matter.
The wave of computer crashes apparently struck both Washington, D.C. — where Lois Lerner oversaw the agency’s Exempt Organizations division — and also Cincinnati, Ohio — where agents processed tax-exempt applications.
The Federal Records Act requires IRS employees to save all of their emails pertaining to agency business and to also print those emails out in case they have a computer crash.
IRS commissioner John Koskinen claimed in testimony in March that the IRS employees’ emails were saved on servers, but then testified this month that he doesn’t know of any “magical way” to get the missing emails back.
The IRS canceled its six-year business relationship with the email-archiving firm Sonasoft in September 2011, weeks after Lerner’s computer crash, and also prematurely retired data storage devices at its IT offices in Maryland.
Here are the seven IRS employees who could use a tutorial on hard drive-fixing...
