Learner does not mention lost emails when discussing crashed hard drive

Fox New;
Computer experts and Republican lawmakers are poking holes in IRS claims that the agency did all it could to retrieve embattled ex-official Lois Lerner's allegedly "lost" emails, which the agency blames on a 2011 hard-drive crash.

The email revelation already has prompted three congressional hearings -- with more likely to come -- as lawmakers grow more skeptical of the explanation and look for inconsistencies in the story. Among them, they point to a flurry of emails from mid-2011 between Lerner and the agency's information technology team about the alleged computer failure which was attached to the agency's mea culpa delivered to Congress earlier this month.

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, in testimony on Capitol Hill this week, cited those emails as proof of the hard drive crash.

But Lerner's communications with the agency's IT team referred to her desire to retrieve "lost personal files" -- not lost emails.

And that detail is "very suspicious," according to David Kennedy, chief executive of information security firm TrustedSec. Kennedy said that when government computers crash, email recovery should be a priority. But in Lerner's communication with the IT team, "There is no talk about the recovery of the emails," Kennedy said, adding, "It didn't seem like they really wanted to recover the data."
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The first email, from June 13, 2011, is a brief notification from one of Lerner's colleagues in the Exempt Organizations division to other IRS staff that Lerner's hard drive had crashed, with information on how to reach her. The next set of emails starts on July 19, 2011, and shows Lerner reaching out to IT staffers for their help in retrieving "lost personal files."

"There were some documents in the files that are irreplaceable," she wrote.
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The story about saving the email on the hard disk still does not ring true to me.  You have to believe that the IRS is really not very smart when it comes to computer data and record keeping, to believe their story at all.

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