The missing Lois Lerner emails is a hot subject. There are over 900 comments on the Washington Examiner article, Lois Lerner on IRS hard drive crash: ‘Sometimes stuff just happens’ . Obviously there are a lot of people annoyed with this excuse. The idea that the emails were lost in a disk drive crash rankles me so I joined the fray. I can understand where she may not have lost some of her Word or Excel documents but not her emails. Here is what I said:

To an old IT guy like me, recovering files is a completely different problem than recovering emails. It is my understanding that the IRS uses Outlook with Exchange servers as their email system. When you install Outlook on a new drive it creates a new copy of your mailbox with all of your emails. I literally have done this dozens of times. If she is missing files then we are probably talking about Excel and Word documents that were not emailed, saved on the server, or backed up by some other means. If there are missing emails in her mailbox then she deliberately deleted them and the IRS will have to find copies of them in the backups and archives.

Eventually the IRS and the Administration are going to have a Nixon moment in which they figure out that the cover-up is having bigger political repercussions than the original crime.