For the Obama administration, the Year of the Computer Glitch just produced the most convenient one of all.
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Late Friday, while people were leaving to celebrate Father’s Day, the government announced the mother of all mistakes: an “inadvertent” deletion of all the relevant IRS targeting emails. Even for the Obama administration, which no one would accuse of technological competence, the coincidence is tough to swallow.
Losing two years of Lois Lerner’s emails, the IRS chief at the heart of the conservative targeting scandal, seems a stretch even for a White House as inept as this one. Yet that’s exactly what the government insists happened after a computer crash in 2011.
Congressman Dave Camp (R-Mich.), Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, was furious that the agency was just now fessing up to the missing messages.
“The fact that I am just learning about this, over a year into the investigation, is completely unacceptable and now calls into question the credibility of the IRS’s response to congressional inquiries. There needs to be an immediate investigation and forensic audit by Department of Justice as well as the inspector general.”
And naturally, Camp said, the missing messages are just the ones investigators needed “to and from people outside the IRS, “such as the White House, Treasury, Department of Justice, FEC, or Democrat offices.”
Even the media has trouble believing the files, which the IRS testified as recently as March were “stored on a servers,” could vanish into thin air. “Do you believe in the Easter bunny? Do you believe in Santa Claus? Do you believe that Lois Lerner’s emails suddenly went poof?” joked CNN’s John King. “Waiting a year to tell the Congress makes me suspicious,” King said. “Absolutely,” said an AP reporter. “There is nothing good about the way this has been handled.”
Making matters worse, IT experts are tripping over themselves to debunk the myth. “I don’t know of any email administrator that doesn’t have at least three ways of getting that mail back… There are at least three ways the government can get those emails.” This isn’t a small business office trying to recover emails. This is the United States government, with every possible tool and resource at its disposal. The administration insists there is no back-up. But so far, the only thing the White House isn’t backing up is its own story.
LifeNews Note: Tony Perkins is the president of the Family Research Council.
