Bernie Becker
The Hill
8/14/2014
A federal judge on Thursday pressed the IRS for additional information about former agency official Lois Lerner’s missing emails, suggesting he expected more from the agency’s filings earlier this week.
Judge Emmet Sullivan of U.S. District Court in Washington is seeking answers on four different fronts, including what efforts the IRS made to recover Lerner’s lost emails from alternate sources like an iPhone or Blackberry.
Sullivan gave the IRS just over a week, until Aug. 22, to supply those answers, as part of a lawsuit filed by a conservative watchdog, Judicial Watch, seeking Lerner’s emails through a freedom of information lawsuit. The judge had previously given the agency a month to respond to his previous order, which asked more general questions about how Lerner’s computer crashed in 2011…
…In his order, Sullivan asked the IRS to provide more information on how the IRS uses bar codes to track computer equipment and whether bar codes are used for hard drives. The agency has said in filings for the True the Vote lawsuit that it only put bar codes on larger pieces of equipment, like laptops, but it retrieved the bar code for Lerner’s hard drive from an outside contractor.
The judge also inquired about a process known as degaussing, a magnetic process that wipes information off of hard drives. The IRS has said that Lerner’s hard drive was wiped clean to protect taxpayer information, and Sullivan wants to know agency procedure for tracking that process…
Read the entire article at The Hill.
Related: Under Oath: IRS officials detail Lerner computer crash in declarations to court (video)
…The declarations submitted were from five IRS officials, including two who said they personally worked on the hard drive.
In their declarations, the two IT officials insisted they did everything they could to recover Lerner’s lost files. Aaron G. Signor, an information technology specialist, recounted how he ran multiple tests on the hard drive and attempted to recover the data, but it was to no avail…
…Judge Sullivan appointed Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola to manage and assist in discussions between Judicial Watch and the IRS about how to obtain any missing records from sources. Magistrate Facciola is an expert in e-discovery.
Judge Sullivan also authorized Judicial Watch to submit a request for limited discovery into the missing IRS records by September 24.
Folks, this is a huge victory for Judicial Watch and its members and supporters. This extraordinary court ruling is a key step in unraveling the Obama IRS’s ongoing cover-up of its abuses against critics of this administration…
