RUSH: What’s this? No, no, no, no. This simply cannot be true. It says here that the head of the IRS, that would be the commissioner, John Koskinen — the guy looks like a cross between a turtle and a lizard. I have both in the backyard, so I know what I’m talking about. Depends on whether he’s smiling or squinting. But, anyway, he confirmed yesterday that investigators looking into missing e-mails from Lois Lerner’s computer have found backup tapes, and they are reviewing the backup tapes. All of this despite earlier claims that the tapes had been recycled, i.e., thrown out.
After all of these denials, after all these claims, they have also found out that Lois Lerner’s hard drive was not anything other than scratched. It was not erased. It did not crash. It was just scratched. Now, let me take a brief moment. As many of you know, I am, compared to average consumers, an expert when it comes to tech. I would be considered, by average users, to be a power user. I’m actually not, but compared to average users, I am. And I know about hard drives.
I’m an expert in telling you how to preserve them, back them up, make sure that you’re protected against them actually crashing, because they all will at some point. But unlike what the claim was at the IRS, they’ve now claimed as many as 20 hard drives crashed within the same week. That doesn’t happen, unless somebody does it on purpose. But a scratched hard drive?
Now, Lois Lerner, I don’t know what kind of computer she had. She probably had some form of a desktop computer in the IRS office, and then she had a laptop that she carried around with her at home, to work, and maybe that was all she had. I don’t know what the computer setup is at the IRS. And I don’t know whether they have a computer that never leaves the office and the laptop that has data mirrored on it, that they travel around with and at home. We know they’ve got a secret instant message program above and beyond the e-mail, internal e-mail, but I just want to talk to you about the hard drive for a moment, this whole notion that the hard drive was scratched.
Do you know what you’d have to do to scratch the hard drive of a computer? That is something that cannot happen in normal usage. Now, there are many kinds of hard drives. There’s solid state drive and there’s the standard hard drive, which is a very fast spinning disk with a stylus type thing in there that reads it. Those are the slower ones. They’re the common ones, the cheapest. They’re the norm and they make a lot of noise. The solid state drives are just lickety-split fast, and they’re cool. But, they’re extremely expensive so they have not hit mass usage as of yet.
For example, your iPhone, if you have like a 32-gig iPhone, it’s 32-gig of flash storage in there. On the Macs it’s 64. I think they’re gonna up that to 128. But the phone has a hard drive in it called flash storage, and it’s 32 gigs or whatever size you have. In a computer, you need anywhere from 256 up to a terabyte and that costs a lot. So I think she’s probably got — it’s the IRS, remember, not state-of-the-art — probably got old standard hard drives that make a lot of noise. To scratch one of these things you’d have to take the computer apart. You’d have to dig in, you’d have to know where, once you’ve got the housing off the computer, you’d have to know where in it the hard drive is, and the average user is not going to know where the hard drive is.
It doesn’t say “hard drive” on it. It doesn’t say “disk drive.” It doesn’t say “startup disk.” It doesn’t say any of that if you don’t know what it is. And if you do know what it is, you’re gonna have to remove it, and they’re usually screwed in very tightly. So you have to get screwdriver, and it may not be normal size because computers are made to keep people out of ’em. Well, the good ones are. But if you manage even to get this far, you get the thing torn apart, the housing’s all off, you have the innards exposed, and then you think you know where the hard drive is, then you gotta take it out. And once you take it out you’ve gotta remove the housing that covers the actual disk drive inside. And then you’ve gotta get something to scratch it. It’s not gonna scratch itself.
Now, there may be a few instances where that can happen if you’re very careless and you bump the thing around while it’s in use, you drop it off the edge of the desk while it’s in use, but they are trying to rely on the fact that nobody knows anything about the subjects. “Oh, guess what, you know what? We found backup tapes. Lo and behold,” after denying that any of ’em existed and then after saying her hard drive crashed and there was no way of getting the data back, now it’s just scratched.
Now, what’s changed? What is causing the IRS to go, “You know, wait a minute, guess what, you know what, we sent another team in there and another team found there are some backup tapes. And her hard drive is only scratched.” You’ve got two no-nonsense federal judges looking at this now. One of them is Emmett — memory block — Sullivan, I think. These two judges are demanding that the IRS say everything they said up ’til now under oath. They’ve been given 30 days. That was about a week ago. And I think they don’t want to run the risk of saying under oath in a federal courtroom what they’ve been saying in hearings, while also under oath, by the way, at various House committees.
Something about lying, something about perjury in a federal court is not someplace they want to go. So now they’re backing up on this. And it’s clear they’re in a stall tactic. That’s been clear from the get-go. They’re doing everything. Now the stall target date is the November elections. But Trey Gowdy, we had the sound bites, I didn’t have a chance to get to ’em yesterday, Trey Gowdy just laid into Koskinen. Koskinen is just taking fire from all directions, and he doesn’t like it. He gets snooty and snarky in his responses, arrogant as though, you know, “You little pip-squeak, who do you think you are compared to me? I’m the IRS commissioner. And you’re nothing here. The only between you and a bag of excrement is the bag, Congressman Gowdy.” It’s the attitude he’s got. And that’s typical of statist type regimes who believe that they are above any accountability. And these guys are acting exactly that way.
But about Koskinen, as he explains all this, I think it’s pretty clear — let me read the paragraph to you from Fox News. “IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, testifying before a House oversight subcommittee, stressed that he does not know ‘how they found them’ or ‘whether there’s anything on them or not.’ But he said the inspector general’s office advised him the investigators are reviewing tapes to see if they contain any ‘recoverable’ material.”
Now, at this point it’s safe to assume Mr. Koskinen doesn’t know much, if anything, that’s going on at the IRS. “The revelation is significant because the IRS claimed, when the agency first told Congress about the missing emails, that backup tapes ‘no longer exist because they have been recycled,'” and now they found the backup tapes. A-ha. Now, we still don’t know whether the tapes that the inspector general has contain any Lois Lerner e-mails. We don’t know that yet. We’re relying on the IG here to be forthcoming, but it’s still the Regime investigating itself here. But Koskinen has assured us that the investigators are now checking. In other words, they’re investigating. What’s the hurry? There’s no hurry. We got until the November elections to find all this out.
Meanwhile, the Democrats slammed the Republicans on the committee for continuing to hassle Koskinen by recalling him before the committee. Elijah Cummings of the Congressional Black Caucasians said, “This is unseemly, it’s embarrassing, this is not a proper way to run an investigation.” Of course not. When you run an investigation, when the Republicans are running an investigation, you’re not supposed to learn anything. That’s improper, if you actually want to learn anything. The only investigation that is proper is a Democrat investigation, popularly known as a cover-up.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: One other little item here about the IRS. The commissioner, John Koskinen, also revealed yesterday that he’s not speaking to any potential witnesses in the missing e-mails case — and nobody else at the IRS is, either — while the IRS inspector general conducts his own investigation. Koskinen said (summarized), “Look, we’ve got our IG out there looking.
“I’m not doing anything! I’m not investigating anymore. I’m not looking at anyone.” So it’s obviously a delaying tactic. I’ve been told that the IRS has already submitted the affidavits demanded by Emmett Sullivan, the no-nonsense federal judge, and in those affidavits (which are sworn under oath) the IRS has asserted that Lois Lerner’s disk had been wiped clean. So this revelation comes after their under oath affidavit submission.
So they’re gonna have to go in and change the affidavit. Well, not necessarily. It depends on whether the scratched hard drive means that the data is gone. A scratched hard drive does not get rid of data, folks. We’ve got… (interruption) Ah, the IT guy just hung up! We had an IT guy, a guy claiming to be one on a cell call from Texas. He was either robbed by an illegal immigrant (and who knows what happened to him) or he lost his connection.
But I was ready to go to him. They have so many illegals crossing the border now, I hope it wasn’t a crime and that’s not why the guy’s not here anymore. But he was gonna point out that a scratched hard drive does not equal loss of data. There’s plenty of data to recover there. Some of it’s gonna be partial and some of it’s gonna be damaged, but it doesn’t mean just ’cause there’s a little scratch in there, there’s no data.
Unless somebody’s gone in with a Scratch-all and just scratched the whole thing, but if that is the case then it’s purposeful and somebody who knew what they were doing is going in there and did it. So bottom line is, I think it’s safe to conclude that this commissioner and Lois Lerner and everybody else involved knows exactly what they did.
They know exactly that they were doing Obama’s will. They knew, and on purpose were trying to impede and harm political efforts of Tea Party types. They know they did this and there’s a stall campaign underway to make sure that that data, that information is not produced before the midterm election, and maybe ever, ’cause I’m sure these people don’t want to face any federal charge.
Not that they would, because that would mean the Justice Department would have to get involved and we know that isn’t gonna happen.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Manchester, New Hampshire, this is Ben. Thank you very much for waiting, and welcome to the program. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. Mega dittoes.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Long-time listener. I’ve listened to you pretty much my whole life. I want to go back to what you talked about at the end of last hour about the Lois Lerner hard drive.
RUSH: Yes, sir.
CALLER: I work in IT security, so I got a little familiarity with how some of this works.
RUSH: Okay, since you do, do you have any idea what kind of computer she used? Do you have any clue, even a best-guess estimate?
CALLER: Honestly, I’m not 100% sure. I know companies like Dell… The government probably wouldn’t use companies like Lenovo ’cause they’re based in China, but probably something like Dell or HP or something like that.
RUSH: All right. And they’re using Windows probably?
CALLER: Most likely.
RUSH: Would she have the same data in the Cloud or would she have data exclusively on that hard drive that’s not on a desktop that she had?
CALLER: Most likely she would have the e-mails stored on their exchange servers and all their backup and everything.
RUSH: Exactly, so she could find it wherever she happens to be. Exactly right.
CALLER: And also, the e-mails, wherever she sent them, should be on other people’s computers or you should be able to go into the exchange server and be able to pull to or from her.
RUSH: Exactly. They’re on a server somewhere.
CALLER: Yeah. As far as the physical damage goes, a scratch or whatever, like you said, either it’s gonna be a drive going via normal wear-and-tear, or it’s gonna be the computer was struck.
RUSH: How would you scratch a hard drive? You probably have a good answer for this. What is scratching a hard drive? Is it exactly what it sounds like?
CALLER: Pretty much so. Like you said, the hard drive has a bunch of spinning plates in there, and it’s got a magnetic head that reads and writes the data. So sometimes if something just wears down, a lot of times the initial damage is done by the head.
RUSH: Right. If you throw it off the table while it’s in action, you can cause that head to scratch it.
CALLER: Yeah, exactly. The head, while it’s reading and writing, will move out of where it’s supposed to be and either dig it out or write the data in the wrong place or something like that.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: That could cause physical damage to it.
RUSH: Folks, to envision this, what we’re talking about, think of an old turntable where the hard drive is the platter. It’s the record. Except it spins real fast, and instead of a needle stylus, there’s a magnetic head in there that’s reading and writing the data. But that’s what we’re talking about with the hard drive. It’s not a block of metal with stuff on it. It’s actually a spinning plate, and there are different capacities of it. But it’s protected by the computer, and then it’s protected inside the computer by its own shell, right?
CALLER: Yep. Correct.
RUSH: So how would you get to it? If you wanted to manually scratch a hard drive, what you would you do?
CALLER: You’d have to… While it’s running, you’d have to shake it pretty good, or you’d have to actually pull it open and physically damage it. That’s really the best way to do it, honestly. I mean, usually in most cases a laptop hard drive is more susceptible to damage like that because you’re moving it around, whatever.
Typically a desktop wouldn’t get damaged that easily from violent movement or whatever. So if the hard drive’s gonna go on a desktop, it’s typically because it’s old, components wear out inside. Typically it will start with something small, maybe a little chip in one of the plates. That small, little chip might spin around and start damaging other portions of the plates in there as well.
RUSH: You work in an IT department. Can you tell me how often you encounter somebody working at any business with a scratched hard drive? How often do you encounter this?
CALLER: Not terribly often, honestly. Typically when we do, we have backup systems in place. So we’ll be able to recover most of the data, and usually have warning signs that a drive is going. It doesn’t usually go just instantaneously. Like I had a drive go on me a couple months ago. I had warning signs. I started seeing data corruption. I was still able to recover quite a bit of the data without really using anything super sophisticated to get the data back. Some of the data was corrupted, but I was still able to get the vast majority of it, though.
RUSH: But a literally scratched hard drive, which is what they’re claiming happened to hers.
CALLER: Mmm-hmm?
RUSH: This is not a frequently occurring problem with computers?
CALLER: Typically not, and especially corporations and most likely in the government as well, have a hardware lifecycle where every couple years they’ll migrate everything over to a new system that would include a new hard drive. So the likelihood of a hard drive aging out and starting to go because of age should be diminished because of that.
RUSH: Right. So when she said her hard drive crashed and so did others and they lost the data, that’s…
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: If that’s the case, then this place is not being run responsibly because there ought to be backups of everything multiple times a week and they ought to be off site and they ought to be on different formats.
CALLER: Mmm-hmm.
RUSH: A hard drive crash on a laptop ought not result in any data loss.
CALLER: Yeah. If the drives did go, even if it happened before all this came out, they should have backups. You know, if there’s sensitive information on there that was only on there, they should have gone to great lengths to try to get that data back, and there are ways to get data on of a drive that’s either partially damaged or, you know, even severely damaged in some cases.
RUSH: Well, now, Dave Camp, who’s a former federal law enforcement Department of Defense… Well, he’s a congressman. He said that experts in federal law enforcement and Department of Defense forensic experts that he talked to, say that most of the data on a scratched drive like Lerner’s should have been recoverable from the drive.
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: You wouldn’t even have to go to the backup.
CALLER: Yep.
RUSH: Well, there you go. Well, I’m glad you called, because here you have somebody in IT. He does this stuff for a living and knows what he’s talking about, and there you have it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s John. I’ve got another IT, information technology expert, from Ronkonkoma, New York, on the phone. I’m glad you called, sir. Welcome.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thanks for taking the call. Good talking to you again.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: Here’s a couple of other points. The guy from New Hampshire covered a lot, and it was very good. The other point is that these e-mails would not have been destroyed obviously with just the hard drive crash ’cause they’re on a server. Also, if that server crashed — and just take it that these servers have multiple hard drives, so if a hard drive crashes on a server that has a backup. If the server actually crashes, it would have a server that backs up that system.
RUSH: Isn’t what a RAID array is?
CALLER: Right. A RAID array is multiple hard drives that write the same data.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: So the hard drive goes on a server, you still have the data. You can change that hard drive and you do not lose the data. Also, in addition to the RAID, you have what you call clustered servers, where you have a server that’s sitting right next to the other server that has the exact same data on it that’s mirrored to it, and they do that either nightly or whatever, and, you know, I think he mentioned also disaster recovery where they have alternate data centers. I’m sure the IRS has a disaster recovery site. If that whole data center had a fire, they would go to an alternate data center. You don’t lose data like this.
RUSH: Precisely. Well, any government agency would have this attitude about itself, but particularly the government’s collection agency is not going to lose its data.
CALLER: No, not at all. I mean, take this into account also. Health care, IT and also, you know, banks, financial institutions, they got audited by external auditors of how they back up their data, how they protect their data. I mean, it’s just unheard of that they could lose e-mail data and just never be able to find them.
RUSH: John, I need to ask you a question about how new all this is, because to the average consumer, I think, hearing all of this, a lot of it’s foreign. People don’t have RAID array backups in their homes.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: They don’t have servers in their homes. Some of them do, but they don’t have a server that backs up a server. Now, businesses have been computerized for the longest time starting way back with IBM mainframes.
CALLER: Oh, of course.
RUSH: When did all of this really start, the business of computing in corporations as a backup and as an interoffice communication mechanism and as file storage, that predates consumer computer operations by how many years?
CALLER: Oh, of course. Even the mainframes, I mean, you know, you see like the pictures of the mainframe computers, you’ll see the big tapes. You know, they used to have these giant reel-to-reels.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: It’s been done forever.
RUSH: Back in the day when IBM was dominant in that field.
CALLER: Yeah, now with Microsoft databases and UNIX and just all these different products.
RUSH: Don’t leave out Oracle.
CALLER: Yeah, Oracle, SQL, you just don’t lose data. You know, and once again, remember, all that data is on a server. So if my hard drive crashed on my laptop, I would get a new laptop, connect to the server, and all those e-mails are there.
RUSH: Right. Well, but that’s true if your e-mail’s on an iMap account. If you’re using a POP account, that may not be the case. The server has to be set up correctly to hold onto the data after it dumps it to the computer.
CALLER: No, it’s there, ’cause it synchronizes. With Microsoft, anyway, it’ll synchronize the data on your laptop to the server. So what’s on your laptop is still local. If it’s not on the server, you may lose that, but it synchronizes as you’re working, so it should always be on the server unless you deleted it or, yeah, unless you deleted it, it should still be there.
RUSH: Well, I used to have a setup — I changed a lot of my different e-mail accounts to iMap, and I did this for security. I had a POP account, and when I downloaded e-mail from the server, it was gone, and it was only on my local, either the desktop or the laptop.
CALLER: Right, you could do that, but once again, if you’re on a corporate network, usually you’re not using a —
RUSH: No, no. You can’t do it on a corporate. That’s my point, that’s strictly consumer. You couldn’t do that on a corporate network. They wouldn’t let you get away with it.
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: The difference is trying to help consumers understand this because consumers don’t know what a RAID array is, and they shouldn’t. The way the IRS gets away with this is, if you tell the average American that their hard drive blew, they’ve lost their data. So if the IRS says, “Yeah, her hard drive blew,” they think she lost her data. It’s a very easy lie to convince consumers of ’cause they don’t know —
CALLER: Right. Exactly.
RUSH: — what you just told us. They don’t know that the norm is what you just told us. In an average American house — that’s why we advertise IDrive. I’ll never forget this nice women friend of mine who discovered the iPhone, and it was the greatest thing ’cause of the camera. She had pictures of her grandkids and kids. She just loved this phone, just loved it. And then one day something happened to it, and her phone wouldn’t start up, and I said, “Okay, you’re backed up, right?” She had no idea what I was talking about.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: She was totally clueless about backing up. She was in her sixties, she had never backed up anything in her life. The closest she’d ever come was, you know, two copies on the IBM Selectric.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: So when the IRS sits there and uses consumer lingo to try to give themselves cover — that’s why I’m glad you called — because the consumer version of this is nowhere near what is required of businesses.
CALLER: Totally different animal.
RUSH: Right. Well, I’m glad you called. I appreciate that, John.
CALLER: Thanks, Rush.
RUSH: You bet. So that’s my point here, folks, is when Lois Lerner, this Koskinen guy, tell you or tell a congressional committee or the media, “Her hard drive crashed,” irrelevant. Now, if your hard drive crashes, I don’t know how many of you are backed up. But I know most of you don’t have a server in your house. If you use a server, it’s another company’s that you’re paying a service for. If you have Yahoo mail or AOL mail or Gmail, you’re on their servers. And that mail is there, no matter what happens to your computer. But you don’t have that in your house. But if you don’t know any of this and your computer dies, you think you’ve lost everything.
But in the business world, they’re not allowed, particularly investment houses and banks, they’re not allowed to only have one copy. That’s why there are things called IT departments. So when these crafty little people at the IRS start using consumer lingo to explain what happened to their poor employees, it’s irrelevant. Hard drive crash, big deal. The data is somewhere and every IT expert will tell you this.
Lois Lerner’s hard drive got scratched? Irrelevant. You can still get the data off of it, but her hard drive is not where the e-mails are. They’re somewhere else and they’re required by law to be somewhere else. That was Trey Gowdy’s point. We all have to be able to produce on demand everything they want from us from five years ago, seven years ago, whatever it is, and they’re running around, “My hard drive died!” trying to convince, well, it’s gone if your hard drive died. Not for them, folks. Maybe for you. Not for them.