The IRS threw Lois Lerner’s hard drive away

  Earlier this week Darrell Issa issued a subpoena for Lois Lerner’s hard drive after it was learned that her emails related to the targeting scandal were supposedly lost in a computer crash.

  When I read this story I began a post that I never published in which I jokingly and sarcastically predicted what the IRS’s response to the subpoena would be but I never published it. In that post I wrote the IRS would tell the Congress something like this: “oh, no, you misunderstood us, when we said the computer crashed we meant it crashed from the 17th story down to the pavement below and was in a million little pieces.”

  Now I wish I published that post because that is kind of what the IRS is claiming. The IRS is now claiming they cannot produce the hard drive because it has been recycled, or destroyed if you will. Not quite what I was going to predict but close enough when you think about it–the end result is the same.

Ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s crashed hard drive has been recycled, making it likely the lost emails of the lightning rod in the tea party targeting controversy will never be found, according to multiple sources.

“We’ve been informed that the hard drive has been thrown away,” Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, said in a brief hallway interview.

  Even if this is true, and I believe it is because the IRS wanted to get rid of any evidence, it really shouldn’t matter because while Lois Lerner could have saved the emails on her hard drive that is not where emails are stored. They are stored on servers and even if they magically disappeared from the servers the agencies she sent these emails to should also have copies.