Republicans will seize on anything at all to perpetrate a faux scandal against the Obama administration and the facts of the Lois Lerner/IRS email scandal backs that up. If you haven't been in Antarctica for the last few months you'll know that Republicans have been going ballistic on the IRS and Lois Lerner, claiming a government conspiracy directed at poor misunderstood conservatives. What has their undies in a bunch at this time is a batch of lost emails from 2011, that the IRS said they lost.
What Republicans aren't really telling you is that Lerner herself reported the computer crash and tried to recover them all.
In the above video you'll see Rep. Paul Ryan hyperventilating over the idea that a computer could actually crash and data could actually be lost. It's got to be a federal government conspiracy even bigger than Watergate, don't you know?
Over the past week, there have been many headlines about "lost emails" from a key IRS figure. This has fed some fears of a possible cover-up in the scandal over the IRS's treatment of conservative groups.References have been made to Watergate and the infamous gap of 18 and a half minutes in one of President Nixon's tapes.
But right now, this doesn't look like much of a cover-up. Lerner reported the emails lost, and tried to have them recovered, in mid-2011 — two years before the IRS scandal broke. So while the IRS's technical proficiency doesn't come off looking particularly good, the timeline we have suggests that the lost e-mails have little to do with the scandal.
I guess she must have used her lucky eight ball that whispered sweet nothings into her ear.
Last week, the IRS told Congress of its findings — Lerner's computer crashed in mid-2011, and many of her emails appear to be gone. The agency did manage to reconstruct and supply some of them by pulling them from other employees' accounts — and 67,000 emails that Lerner wrote or received were handed over. But Congressional Republicans were unsatisfied, to say the least, as you can see in this angry statement from Rep. Paul Ryan:
Is there documentation of this alleged computer crash?
Yes. On June 13, 2011, reference first turns up in internal IRS emails that Lerner's hard drive had crashed. In a series of emails afterward, Lerner attempted to get technical help restoring her data — but on August 5, 2011, she was informed that it was unrecoverable.Those dates matter because there was no IRS scandal back then. The scandal didn't break until May 2013 — nearly two years after the reported hard drive crash. Issa's committee didn't start looking into the IRS treatment of nonprofit groups until early 2012, and the Treasury Department's inspector general started his investigation months after that.
Read the entire article to see that once again how off the wall Republicans are. When will the media finally just ignore these desperation calls for inquires and scandals from the GOP?
