Scandal: The IRS canceled a contract with an email storage contractor weeks after Lois Lerner reported lost personal files and before other IRS officials had their hard drives crash as Tea Party-targeting investigations began.
Timing is everything, the saying goes, and sometimes the timing of events is also very curious, as in the case of the lost emails of Lerner and at least six other officials at the very same time the IRS canceled its contract to back up and preserve those emails as required by federal law.Lerner's computer supposedly crashed in June 2011, an alleged event the IRS concealed from the American public and congressional investigators for two years.
This event, which cannot be verified because her hard drive has since been destroyed and recycled, occurred just 10 days after House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rep. Dave Camp first wrote a letter asking if the IRS was engaging in targeting of nonprofit groups.
This shouldn't have been a problem because, as the Daily Caller reports, the IRS had a contract beginning in 2005 with Sonasoft, an email-archiving company based in San Jose, Calif.
The company advertises that it provides "Email Archiving Done Right" and "Point-Click Recovery" and in a 2009 tweet boasted: "The IRS uses Sonasoft to back up their servers, why wouldn't you choose them to protect your servers?"
Perhaps this is what IRS Commissioner John Koskinen was referring to when in March testimony before the House Oversight Committee he assured Rep. Jason Chaffetz that the reason requested emails were difficult to provide was that IRS emails "get taken off and stored in servers."
Later we would be told that the emails were lost forever and, as we noted, Koskinen was lying in March, when he said they were somewhere, or in June, when he said they were nowhere to be found. Let us ponder another possibility: that the emails were taken off and stored in Sonasoft servers, emails that would be deleted when the IRS contract for their storage ended. They were not lost, but, in effect, deliberately destroyed.



















