Former IRS official Lois Lerner is apparently not the only person to suffer an ill-fated hard drive crash at the tax collection agency. In fact, through new testimony we have learned just about everyone of note experienced some sort of crash that resulted in the loss of data. Furthermore, it remains to be seen if any of the data in question was actually backed up.
“The IRS really should call Silicon Valley because they have the strangest virus going [around] on [their] hard drives,” Glenn joked on radio this morning. “This is really weird.”
According to transcribed congressional testimony from IRS Deputy Associate Chief Counsel Thomas Kane, up to 20 IRS employees were plagued by a computer crash. Coincidently, one ‘low level’ employee in Cincinnati, Ohio (i.e. the very people blamed for targeting conservative groups) was among those affected.
The new round of computer crash victims includes David Fish, who routinely corresponded with Lois Lerner, as well as Lerner subordinate Andy Megosh, Lerner’s technical adviser Justin Lowe, and Cincinnati-based agent Kimberly Kitchens.
In the testimony, Kane also said there is a good chance any backup drives containing the missing data have been destroyed as well because of the IRS’ “six-month retention schedule.”
While Glenn praised Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee for its ongoing investigation into the IRS scandal, Glenn believes this blatant disregard of the truth has been able to persist because everyone else is sweeping these reports under the rug.
“They’re getting away with it because… it takes more than one branch of the government to do it. It takes more than a couple of guys,” Glenn concluded. “You can’t get a special investigator from the Justice Department. You have no help from the media. You have no help from your own party. It’s really a handful of guys, and they’re heroes… What they’re standing up against is remarkable. And the fact that the press just doesn’t report it is despicable.”
Front page image courtesy of the AP