Y'know, just for this summer, anyone who wants to be all Geese vs. Gander-y about this should be reminded that manipulation of the IRS was a central pillar in the impeachment effort which drove Nixon from office... Far, far, far from office, never to return again.

Integrity is not virginity; Our need for it doesn't disappear with the first violation.

(Metaphor stolen from an old Doonesbury cartoon.)

It doesn't matter which party it is. Data retention laws are, in fact, laws. With punishments attached to violations. They should be rigorously enforced.

Apparently the IT at the IRS really is set up to archive emails on individual PCs, with no meaningful backup. Any company IT department that worked this way would have set the company up for massive legal problems.

Why does the government get to skate? The managers responsible for setting and funding the IT policies at the IRS need to personally pay some serious fines.

Of course, this is the same government that imposes GAAP on companies, while being completely incapable of GAAP-compliant accounting itself.

The level of incompetence in IT apparently allowed in the Federal government is ridiculous. I work for a community college, and our IT guys are constantly maintaining and updating our archiving system. In fact, at the branch campus I work at, a full third of the server room space is related to archiving. I've accidentally deleted emails I needed a few weeks down the line, and IT can recall them easily for me within a few days. That's why I have a problem with both instances.

The stonewalling here goes well beyond missing emails.

There is evidence that they exist, or should exist on the servers. No one believes them.

And this isn't the White House, which in many cases can claim executive privilege. This is the IRS.

I am waiting to see all of Lois Lerners emails for the month after the supposed computer crash. If they are not filled with apologies to all her correspondents, requesting that they resend all the lost communications, I don't buy it.

"Within those 22 million lost emails were five million emails that were lost relating to the 2007 firing of eight U.S. Attorneys. "

A little hypocrisy in the hypocrisy accusations: Clinton fired all of the U.S. attorneys, and it was, and continues to be, a non-story.

And, again, because "someone else" did it, we are supposed to say, "Oh, okay then."

This is the Two Wrongs Fallacy, and it is ony one of the ways you and I are being wronged.

Also, I'm not sure those numbers add up. There were five million emails relating to the firing of the U.S. Attorneys? Let's assume there were about 100 people in total involved in that in some fashion, and that most of the discussion about it took place over a year. A year is about 260 working days, but let's say 300 for good measure. So doing the math:

5,000,000 / (100 *300)

That means every person involved in it was sending about 160 emails a day, every single working day. Is that plausible? I'm a pretty heavy email user at work but my high-water mark recently has been about 30 in a day (I just checked my outbox). Maybe there was some kind of automated system sending out emails related to the topic, and that's included in the total? I'm not saying the author is lying, but in absence of further explanation, I'm having a hard time with those numbers.

I tried to click the link to the story, but was sent to Movable Type login.

Yes, Republicans are corrupt, too, but let's be honest: this would be a much bigger story if the IRS was targeting liberals. The NY Times and Wash Post have shown little interest in the story, haven't they?

Like Radwaste said, this shouldn't give Lerner, et al. a pass.

Cousin Dave it will depend how e-mails are counted. If I send an e-mail to you is that one e-mail or two, (me send you receive). If I cc it to 16 people, plus myself on a home e-mail, would it be counted as 18 lost e-mails.

My high water one is about 60 legit e-mails in a day and probably triple that in blocked or unblocked spam.

But still the numbers are very high.
And I wonder at the idea of counting missing things, and knowing they are related to a topic.

This man wants me to believe that there were 5 million communications about canning eight employees and 22 million communications about subjecting a single-digit quantum of people to simulated drowning?

Joe, that makes sense... it might be counted as a separate item for each person that received it, if you're going by counting the total number of items in everyone's archives. That makes the original report more credible.

This isn't incompetence... When you change the archive form a mandated full backup/forever keep, which is what I believe Lerner's emails woulda been since she is an official... to local backup, timed delete... you do that for a reason, and that reason is to avoid Discovery in the legal sense. Meaning, you think you might get sued, and have a Judge/Lawyers demand you preserve everything, and allow "Discovery".

The very main thing in this case that's important is not what other people have done, which has been bad before. The important thing was that law was violated with the appearance of targeting citizens for political IRS scrutiny.

It can't be said often enough that Nixon got barbequeued rightly for much less... and somehow, NOW it's a non issue?

"but he was a crook, and ugly."

oh, yeah? Doesn't matter how photogenic, if it's walking like a duck, quacking like a duck, and crapping all over the place... it'sa duck.

Come on. It's not like this administration had promised to be transparent, giving the public plenty of time to comment on proposed bills, fix the VA, and stop the committing of war crimes.

Oh. Anyway, everybody does it and it all happened a long time ago.

☑

I love you guys.

♥♥

…Except Amy, whose admiration for Reason's dispassionate even-handedness will, I fear, in practical result, diminish the righteous bloodlust of the aggrieved taxpayer.

Eh?

OK, I love Amy too. C'mere, ya big lugs! Noogies for everyone!

No, seriousballs: Saying 'Everybody does it' doesn't move things forward. Tritely: An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.

OK gang, I **AM** an InfoSec/Information Security type.

The IRS has broken a number of laws here: the Federal Records Act, and Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) for STARTERS.

You're required by FISMA to keep backups for a minimum of 5 years for EVERYTHING, and FRA/ NARA (National Archives and Records Agency) requirements that anything that is a Federal Record (and all emails count) must be archived indefinitely. . .

> OK gang, I **AM** an InfoSec/Information
> Security type.

What are you superpowers? If we asked you to hit Lois Lerner with a big nasty stick, could you do that? Would you?

Please?



Sincerely grateful for your input... It's just that these generations seem completely uninterested in holding this ever-more-tentacled administration to even modest standards of integrity and lawfulness.

The masthead for PoliticsUSA describes it as "Real Liberal Politics." No agenda there.

And here's the guy who wrote the article.

Jason Easley: Publisher/Editor in Chief

Mr. Easley is a Senior White House and Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. A lifelong lover of politics, Jason Easley is a little older than some but not as old as others. Jason spent four years as a political columnist and the politics editor at 411mania.com, where he covered such issues as the Iraq War, warrant less [sic] wiretapping, and the daily workings of the American legislative process. Jason has also written for the Blogger News Network, and saw his 2008 presidential election coverage quoted in over 300 newspapers worldwide. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements. When Jason is not writing he can be found endlessly courting his girlfriend and expressing his loyal fandom for the Pittsburgh Penguins.

So, he's "a little older than some but not as old as others."

I have a little trouble accepting at face value hard facts from sources that can't take the news gathering process seriously.

Reviewing the Easley-referenced Washington Post article about the Bush Administration's 22 million e-mails reveals that 22 million were recovered (not lost forever as Mr. Easley implies in his article.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/12/groups-announced-settlement-in.html

"The Bush White House ... announced in January it had located more than 22 million messages...."

And the Bush Administration continued to recover e-mails: "Earlier this year, contractors restored 61 days of e-mails -- an expensive process that involves resurrecting lost messages from backup tapes. In addition, the administration has promised to restore an additional 33 days of e-mail records...."

While I'm not condoning any administration setting up backdoor e-mail systems and "losing" e-mails that just happened to have been subpoenaed, this does put a slightly different spin on the "Bush did it, too" argument.

And irony of ironies, The article goes on to quote the archives group counsel, Meredith Fuchs, as saying, "This settlement means that the Obama administration is trying to clean up the mess that the Bush administration left behind. They [the Obama Administration] want to move on; they don't intend to have this kind of problem."

You see, they don't intend to have this kind of problem.

In addition, "Norm Eisen, the [Obama] administration's ethics counsel, said in a posting on the White House blog that President Obama 'is firmly committed to ensuring that the records of this administration -- as well as those of all previous administrations -- are properly retained and preserved.'"

You can rest easy. They're fully committed to not losing any e-mails.

Oh well, Republicans do it too. So, there is really a non-story here then.

Whew, glad that is settled. Now we can all go back to just trying to survive in this Obamanation economy.

Oh wait, I forgot, Obama got me free healthcare. There is a reason to celebrate. Let me call all my friends on my Obama-phone!

One thing I think might be missing is the identification of the "e-mail" system.

At Savannah River Site, it was decided to use Lotus Notes™, superseding cc:mail.

Lotus Notes has, essentially, its own operating system for the presentation of content, called "eclipse". This makes it possible to generate, store, move and edit documents inside Notes. I have been told it emulates Word in some way.

So we might not be talking about losing a bunch of, "Bill, I think we need to move forward on prosecuting the Partridge Family. Signed, Greta (official title here)." Megabytes of other documents could be gone, too, such as writs of attainder, applications for court orders, etc.; I dunno.

I would settle for the IRS being held to the same standard they hold the American taxpayer. Guilty until proven innocent.