Nika Anschuetz is a student at Waynesburg University pursuing a degree in Communication with a concentration in electronic media.

Armed with her scholarship, she takes an in-depth look at the “Mysterious Case of Lois Lerner and the Lost IRS Emails.”

The IRS’s latest mishap revealed that mysteriously somehow, Lois Lerner, former IRS official, had 2 years worth of emails disappear into the great abyss to never be retrieved. Is this a mere coincidence or a sign of a systematic problem in our government?

…But wait, haven’t we been taught that the Internet is forever? Surely, there must be a way to retrieve these emails even though her hard drive crashed.It’s important to note how sending an email works. Emails are stored in mail client applications but they are also stored on the server. IT professionals have agreed that it’s possible to retrieve information from a crashed hard drive.

“Most big organizations that have hard drive failures for key important people in the organization, can send them to these places called clean rooms and they can reassemble the hard drive and fix all the issues out there. In most cases, you can recover,” said David Kennedy in an interview with Greta Van Susteren. 

It is also possible to deliberately crash a hard drive, but in most cases the person is identifiable.

…[I]t’s possible to recover a crashed hard drive and it’s possible to see if someone deliberately crashed their hard drive. Shouldn’t IT professionals working for the federal government be the best of the best? Is there any bit of truth to what the IRS is claiming?…The IRS was able to recover 24,000 of the missing emails through other employee accounts. However, the damage is already done. The administration has failed the American people and all we’re are asking for is reasonable answers. Doesn’t it seem suspicious that the two years of pertinent emails just vanished like that? Poof! Unfortunately, without a transparent administration we may never get to the bottom of this.

Next time the IRS comes knocking on your door for receipts and records regarding tax information, pull a Lois Lerner. Oh no! My hard drive crashed and I accidentally maliciously got rid of all my files.