The “Lost” Lie

It’s been several months now since IRS stooges testified under oath at congressional hearings that Lois Lerner’s infamous emails were “lost” when her computer crashed.

You know – all those pesky documents which would prove once and for all the nature and extent of her criminal wrongdoing in the matter of IRS targeting of conservative political groups to deny them tax exempt status.

But we know that when government agents testify under oath they’re too often lying under oath.

Those emails aren’t “lost.” It’s a lie – the “lost” lie. And so far Lois Lerner and her IRS is getting away with it.

But now, according to the president of the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, Justice Department attorneys have intimated all those "lost" emails likely exist in back-up computers. That’s because the federal government regularly backs up all its computer records to ensure the continuity of government in event of a catastrophe. So even if Ms Lerner’s computer crashed all those emails have been backed up and therefore still exist.

Of course they exist. The law requires that they be backed up. They exist on several computers. But that’s not the end of this charade. The DOJ attorneys insist that retrieving them now from the backup computers would be "too onerous" - a legal burden that can exempt an agency from complying with FOIA requests.

The government has a computer backup procedure to regularly backup all records in case of a crash. So the files won’t be lost. They can’t be lost. But retrieving the backed up files would be too onerous so they’re not going to do it. "They could get these records but they don't want to, and they haven’t told anyone about it until we were able to get it out of them on Friday," admits an administration official.

Everyone, including Congress, knows that those emails exist, but Congress seems completely powerless when it comes to retrieving them. Congress has apparently accepted the “lost” lie.