IRS Backups & Blackberries

by Gary Bauer, Contributing Author: There may be a breakthrough concerning the IRS Tea Party targeting scandal. Judicial Watch, which is currently engaged in a legal battle with the IRS, is claiming that Lois Lerner's emails are not missing.

In a statement yesterday afternoon, the organization said that IRS attorneys acknowledged Friday that "Lois Lerner's emails, indeed all government computer records, are backed up by the federal government in case of a government-wide catastrophe." But it would be "too onerous" to retrieve them.

The implication of the statement is that -- contrary to all previous testimony -- Lerner's emails still exist.

Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch told Fox News: "So everything we've been hearing about scratched hard drives about missing emails of Lois Lerner, other IRS officials, other officials in the Obama administration, it's all been a pack of malarkey."

Fitton went on to accuse the IRS of "massive obstruction of justice."

IRS officials are pushing back, saying that Judicial Watch mischaracterized their statement.

"There was no new back-up system described last week to Judicial Watch," an administration spokesman said. "Government lawyers who spoke to Judicial Watch simply referred to the same email retention policy that Commissioner (John) Koskinen had described in his Congressional testimony."

The IRS claims that its backup tapes are routinely recycled, so any backups of Lerner's emails were (conveniently) lost too. That may well be true. If so, then why say at all that the database is "too onerous" to search? There would be no point in searching it.

Nevertheless, the Treasury Department's inspector general is investigating the backup system and whether data can be retrieved from recycled backup tapes. This confusion will likely lead to another round of sworn statements regarding who said what and exactly what was meant.

But wait…there's more.

Potentially more damaging to the IRS is the revelation that Lois Lerner also had a Blackberry, which should have contained all the missing emails. But, according to this report, "The IRS destroyed Lerner's Blackberry AFTER it knew her computer had crashed and after a Congressional inquiry was well underway."

Lerner was conveniently issued a new Blackberry in February 2012 -- just as news began to break about the IRS targeting conservative groups. Her previous Blackberry would be the one with the missing emails on it. But guess what? The IRS says it has no protocols for retrieving data from such devices because it only backs up computer hard drives!
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Gary Bauer is a conservative family values advocate and serves as president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families

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