06-26-2014, 03:32 PM
Computer experts call Lerner email explanation 'very suspicious'
Quote: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."
It's possible that the emails shared with lawmakers and attached to a June 13, 2014, letter to leaders of the Senate Finance Committee are just a snapshot of Lerner's communications with the IT team. But they indicate Lerner's acute level of concern for what she referred to as her personal files.
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.
Subsequent emails show technicians failed to recover the data, despite exhausting "all avenues." Ultimately, Lerner was told the sectors on her hard drive were "bad," rendering her data unrecoverable.
"Thanks for trying," Lerner wrote back. "Sometimes stuff just happens."
Koskinen cited these discussions during a hearing Monday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, saying the agency's IT division "tried using multiple processes at Ms. Lerner's request to recover the information stored on her computer's hard drive."