@revelette2,
I am not alleging anything as yet. I am saying that the explanation for the IRS not complying with the request by Congress for a significant segment of Lois Lerner's e-mail raises serious questions which give rise to suspicion, and which need to be fully investigated.
If the Administration is involved in a cover-up of illegal or highly inappropriate conduct, and Lerner's e-mail contained evidence of such conduct, we can assume that the cover-up would include preventing Congress from seeing the evidence. Exactly how the Administration may have attempted this remains to be determined. The IRS would not necessarily have had to cause Lerner's computer to crash. Not only are the e-mail said to be gone, so is the hard-drive. An IRS source says that the hard drive has been destroyed which would prevent the recovery of the ""lost" e-mail.
I have no doubt that the hard-drive was, in fact destroyed. The questions I have are why was it destroyed, when and by whom.
There is a possibility the facts are exactly as the IRS has reported: Lerner's computer crashed in 2011, an effort to retrieve the data failed, and internal protocol requiring the hard-drive to be completely destroyed through "magnetic degaussing" was followed.
There is also the possibility that upon discovering what was on Lerner's hard-drive, a decision was made to destroy it rather than allowing congress to see its contents, and then spinning a lie about her computer crashing in 2011 and it needing to be destroyed.
It would be a bold and desperate scheme, but if the hard-drive contained evidence of serious wrong doing, it is not in the least bit unimaginable that it might be attempted. We all know government officials, including presidents get involved in cover-up efforts. They must work quite a lot of the time or they wouldn't be so frequent.
Somehow 18 minutes of the Nixon White House tapes were erased. There is no proof that it was done to destroy evidence, but that was absolutely the widely held belief at the time. If it was a deliberate effort to eliminate incriminating evidence whomever ordered it had to know what it would look like if and when the gap was discovered, but they were desperate enough to do it anyway.
Other than my basis belief that the Administration was abusing its power by using the IRS to punish its enemies, there are several facts concerning this matter that should cause suspicion in a reasonable person.
Lois Lerner pled the 5th in response to questions from congress. Yes, this is her constitutional right and it is not proof of guilt but experience tells us that it is very rare for the innocent to plead the 5th in court or before congress, and can't be viewed in isolation.
The request for Lerner's e-mail was made months before the IRS reported to congress that they had been lost. This could have simply been a matter of bureaucratic delay, but at the time the request was made it would have been a known fact that Lerner's hard-drive had crashed and was discarded. If this is so, why did it take months to so advise congress?
The IRS claim that it's criminal investigation division attempted to retrieve the data from Lerner's hard-drive after it crashed and failed. Numerous data retrieval experts have opined that given the hard-drive, retrieval of most if not all of the data was entirely possible. How could the criminal investigation division of the IRS, that must be aware of all current techniques and possess all the latest technology have failed? They must retrieve data from thousands of "crashed" hard-drives every year.
While the possibility does exist that each of these have a reasonable answer that would not indicate foul-play, it is not reasonable, given the charges that have been made concerning the scandal and the evidence already available, to simply accept the IRS explanation without conducting a thorough investigation. In order for such an investigation to have any chance of getting to the bottom of this, a Special Prosecutor needs to be appointed. The DOJ has already clearly shown it has no interest or intent in a vigorous investigation.
The press should be focusing their investigative resources on this story, but thus far not only have they failed to, they are assisting the Administration by dismissing it as a phony scandal and writing stories that attack the people who say they were harassed rather than investigating their claims.
My point continues to be that one doesn't have to be a partisan crack-pot to find all of what has been going on is suspicious and deserving of a thorough investigation, one only has to be rational. Indeed, to the contrary, waving a hand in front of this and dismissing it as a phony scandal requires a great deal of partisan influence on one's thinking. The degree of disregard for this matter by citizens who either admire Obama, or hate Darryl Issa and the Republicans (or both) just would not be there if a Republican administration was at the center of the scandal.
