Investigators find 32,000 emails in IRS probe

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP-Excite

By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER

WASHINGTON (AP) — Investigators said Thursday they have recovered 32,000 emails related to a former IRS official at the heart of the agency's tea party scandal.

But they don't know how many of them are new.

The emails were to and from Lois Lerner, who used to head the IRS division that processes applications for tax-exempt status. Last June, the IRS told Congress it had lost an unknown number of Lerner's email when her computer hard drive crashed in 2011.

At the time, IRS officials said the emails could not be recovered. But at a congressional hearing Thursday evening, IRS Deputy Inspector General Timothy Camus said investigators recovered thousands of emails from old computer tapes used to back up the agency's email system.

FULL story at link.



FILE - This March 5, 2014 file photo shows former Internal Revenue Service (IRS) official Lois Lerner on Capitol Hill in Washington. Investigators said Thursday, Feb. 26, 2015, they have recovered 32,000 emails related to the former IRS official at the heart of the agency{2019}s tea party scandal. But they don{2019}t know how many of them are new. (AP Photo/Lauren Victoria Burke, File)


Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20150227/us--irs-lost_emails-44506fc1d3.html

[napi21]

1. OK, so what do they say? Do they simply support her statement that the IRS

was questioning everybody who applied for tax exempt status, regardless of politics?

[Thor_MN]

2. They don't know how many are new?

Every single email is freaking timedate stamped in more than one way. Watch for the release late tomorrow that says they didn't find anything of note. #GOPwasteoftime #GOPwasteofmoney

[notadmblnd]

4. if they re not deleted they are backed up over and over and over.....

so there could very well be emails that they already have copies of and not necessarily new ones.

When I worked with servers, we backed them up daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. Each back up had different retention periods. Daily's were kept 2 weeks, weeklies were kept a month. Monthly's were kept 12 months and yearly's were kept 7 years.

[Thor_MN]

6. Each and every email is timedate stamped.

They can very easily filter out emails that are not from the time period they are interested in.

Less easy, but still doable, is comparing the one that are in the time frame to the one that they already have found that disprove their conspiracy fantasies.

Bottom line, late afternoon tomorrow, Friday, they will quietly announce they still are wasting time and money.

[uhnope]

3. agntsa

[Iliyah]

5. KKKKKarl Rove

With Rummy, Cheney and the others are plotting while corporate media who shows you Paul, Walker and the rest of the ones who does not come close to the WH. The one in GOP's eyes is another Bush.

[quadrature]

7. the idea is to run out the clock? on the 114th Congress?

22 more months of this
just wonderful

[PSPS]

8. Still using tapes for backup?

[lastlib]

9. US Government - tight IT budgets - servers - 2011......yeah, probably...........

[LittleGirl]

10. of course.

Hardware equipment costs a butt load of money to replace and I wonder how much time it took to do this? Many gov't agencies use the lowest bid for hardware equipment so you get what you pay for.

We had to restore email back up tapes for a law suit at a company I worked at in 2002 and it took months to get those emails restored. I know. I had to manage the project. It's a labor intensive job to do it and old tapes restore slowly, and you need a butt load of hardware to save the restored files to. And people back then didn't delete emails (because they were covering their ass) so one email backup could be a gig of data or more. Back then, that was a butt load of memory. And hardware back then took hours to function at today's speeds because the technology was just older. So restoring tapes takes a long time because of that fact.

After we restored the data, we had to use search tools to identify the individual's email inbox we had to supply to the lawyers. That took another butt load of hours to run the tool which separated those inboxes from the backups. Then the manual labor hours to actually read the inbox files.

I am glad I wasn't on that project (now) as that would have made me freaking crazy to do that work again.

[LiberalLovinLug]

11. So will they also be probing unfair scrutiny on liberal groups?

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2014/04/23/3429722/irs-records-tea-party/

New Records: IRS Targeted Progressive Groups More Extensively Than Tea Party: