The defense is the first full account of what happened to Lerner’s crashed hard drive. IRS accounts for lost Lerner emails

The IRS declared under oath and penalty of perjury on Friday that Lois Lerner’s hard drive is irrecoverable after being wiped clean by tech staff and recycled with an outside contractor, according to a court filing.

Although an outside company was able to identify the serial number for the computer, the hard drive was wiped clean or “degaussed” and then recycled after several attempts to recover the data by IRS tech personnel, including a career forensic specialist with 25 years worth of experience.


The defense is the first full account from the IRS of what happened to Lerner’s crashed hard drive before a court rather than a panel of lawmakers in response to a tea party group suing the agency. Revelation of lost emails of the former IRS official at the center of the tea party controversy has re-energized critics who accuse the agency and Lerner of hindering their probes.

( Also on POLITICO: Republicans separate in IRS probe)

The IRS filed court-ordered sworn declarations by Stephen Manning, deputy chief information officer for strategy and modernization, and Todd Egass, director of technology operations and investigative services in the IRS criminal investigations unit, detailing the events surrounding the destruction of Lerner’s hard drive.

“To the best of my knowledge and according to discussions between the IT personnel involved, and as a result of the lack of tracking capability of component parts in the [IRS] IT inventory control system, when the hard drive was …batched with other damaged or obsolete miscellaneous equipment, it became impossible to specifically identity the hard drive through any [IRS] equipment inventory system,” wrote Manning in a document filed with the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia late Friday afternoon.

Also filed was a declaration by an official with the IRS watchdog, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, on its probe and the expertise of those examining the missing emails.

( Also on POLITICO: GOP skeptical of Justice IRS probe)

The filings will contribute to D.C. District Court Judge Reggie Walton’s looming decision about whether to appoint an independent computer forensics expert to examine the agency’s computers and make its own assessment about the lost emails, as requested by conservative group True the Vote.

After the IRS revealed that two years of Lerner’s emails disappeared in June, the group asked the court to grant an injunction relief motion barring the agency from destroying documents and to approve the outside expert.

True the Vote says it was one of the original groups that was pulled for extra scrutiny in the tax-exempt application process, suing Uncle Sam after the targeting controversy broke last year.

( Also on POLITICO: Justice probe covers Lerner emails)

The IRS has since approved its nonprofit application, and the government has filed a motion to dismiss the case. The judge last Friday said he’d answer that in 30 days.

The government says that an outside expert will only hinder an ongoing inspector general investigation that is expected within days.

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen has testified before Congress that no evidence was destroyed intentionally.

Walton questioned whether Lerner’s hard drive could be tracked with a serial number — a question on the minds of many IRS skeptics and Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Turns out, they found it, though it might not make much of a difference, because it appears to have been sent to the contractor for destruction and recycling, according to the documents.

IRS tech official Manning testified that since the agency “does not place bar code property tags on computer component parts like the hard drive” and “has no business purpose for recording the serial numbers,” nobody at the IRS had “first-hand knowledge” of the serial number on the hard drive.

As a practice, the IRS only puts barcodes on “whole” equipment, like laptops, desktop computers, printers, FAX machines — not keyboards or speakers or internal hard drives.

But the third-party IT hardware support vendor who supplied Lerner’s computer was able to track it down: 2AGAH01E1XN0ON.

According to Manning’s account, on June 13, 2011, a Help Desk ticket was assigned to a complaint “regarding the operation of the laptop computer assigned to Lois Lerner.” An IT specialist who had been there since 2007 and received regular IT technical training, inspected the laptop and “determined that the hard drive on the laptop was not operating properly.”

The specialist tried to recover data but “all of the … efforts to recover any data were unsuccessful.” It was then sent to the criminal unit forensics lab, but they were also unable to save the data.

IRS criminal division official Eggas described how an unnamed senior analyst with more than 25 years of forensic data recovery experience was unsuccessful in recovering the data, and sent it back to the original service unit.

When that failed, “the hard drive was degaussed and then batched with other miscellaneous equipment (equipment whose inventory is not tracked by bar code tags) and transferred to an external recycling contractor for destruction and recycling.”

The testimony says “degaussing” involves “using a device employing magnetism and is designed to permanently erase data contained on magnetic data storage devices like a hard disk.”

It was sent to an unnamed vendor to be recycled, and contracts with such vendors “typically specify that the storage devices be shredded before recycling of any of the usable shredded materials,” he wrote.

Walton last Friday didn’t make a decision because he wanted to know three things: whether Lerner’s hard drive could be traced and recovered, the rundown of the IT expertise of the TIGTA investigators and an estimated date for when the TIGTA probe would be finished.

He gave them until midnight Friday.

Timothy Camus, the TIGTA deputy inspector general for investigations, used his declaration to tell the judge that the investigators working on the email scandal “are trained law enforcement personnel … criminal investigators.”

He said eight of the 11 working the case are “specially trained and qualified to conduct digital forensics and computer and electronic media related examinations in support of investigations involving computers, emails, the internet and other electronic storage data.”

But he couldn’t give the judge a date for the completion of their investigation: “At this stage of the investigation it is not possible to give an estimate date of completion.”

Cleta Mitchell, the group’s lawyer, said they’re still seeking $85,000 in damages for allegedly being treated differently because of their political beliefs. She has argued that the lost emails relate to the case because they could contain correspondence that affected how True the Vote was treated.

A second conservative group, Judicial Watch, is also seeking information about what the IRS did to recover the lost information. Judge Emmet Sullivan, who also sits on the District Court for the District of Columbia bench, gave the government until Aug. 10 to file a declaration addressing the lost emails, including what steps they could take to recover the hard drive.