RUSH: “Ex-IRS Official: Lois Lerner’s Crashed Hard Drive Has Been Recycled, Making it Likely the Lost E-mails Will Never Be Found, According to Multiple Sources.” This is from Politico. Why would you…? This does not happen, folks. Darrell Issa has said this just doesn’t happen. E-mails don’t get recycled. Servers and hard drives don’t get recycled. This Regime certainly does not use recycled stuff.

If you’ve got a hard drive that’s crashed, and if it crashed ’cause it’s got bad sectors on it, why would you recycle that? Why would you recycle junk? “Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said, ‘We’ve been informed that the hard drive has been thrown away.'” Well, then why claim it was recycled? Does recycling it mean throwing it away?

There’s a vast difference in recycling and throwing something away, especially since it’s practically impossible to get all the data on a disk without a whole bunch of degaussing. Do you know what degaussing is, Snerdley? (interruption) Demagnetizing. You use a giant magnet in there, and you just run it over it. It’s how we used to erase, back in the old days. At the first radio station I worked at, everything was on reel-to-reel tape or cartridges.

You know, the consumer recorders always had an erase head before the record head, so he didn’t have to bulk erase. You could record over reel-to-real tape at home because it had the erase head. Broadcast equipment didn’t have that. You had to degauss. It was a circular machine with a handle that you pressed the button. It was a giant electromagnet and you put the real under it and you turn circles on it or on the tape cartridge.

That was how you erased that was called mass degaussing, and if you put one of those things in front of a TV screen you were screwed. We actually did some harmless little vandalism with some of my friends once; we degaussed half of their TV screen. (laughing) They were rich. They could afford another one. Anyway, that’s what you would have to do, if you wanted to.

Now, in fact, when you reformat a hard drive, that’s essentially what you are doing. You’re erasing it. Yeah. Even forensic IT guys can’t find it. The point here is that now that Congress is demanding that the IRS turn over her hard drive, the IRS is now ramping up. Not only did her hard drive crash, now, in addition to that, they threw it away. But this happened a long time ago.

Why wasn’t this little detail ever mentioned before they got the request to turn over the drives? And there’s this line in the story: “On Wednesday, the White House retorted that for the time frame in which Lerner’s e-mails are missing, there are no direct communications between 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Lerner.”

How do they know if everything’s been thrown away, if everything’s been erased? If there was a crash, how do they know? Well, if it’s true, they know because they knew what they wanted to throw away. And since they’ve thrown it away, of course there isn’t anything left now. But it’s easy to claim now, after everything’s been erased, crashed, and now recycled, thrown away, easy to claim, “By the way, there was nothing there anyway,” now that the evidence has been destroyed. (interruption) Well, that’s a good question. Why did Lois Lerner basically take the fifth if there was nothing there? Why did Lois Lerner try to hide behind her Fifth Amendment privilege if there was nothing there?

Then, ladies and gentlemen, there is this story. “IRS ‘Lost’ Emails From Official That Met With Top Obama Assistant.” This is another woman, Nikole Flax. “An IRS official whose emails were ‘lost’ visited the White House frequently during the agencyÂ’s targeting of conservatives and met with a top assistant to President Obama who exchanged confidential information on conservative groups with the IRS.”

Can I read that to you again? An IRS official, her name is Nikole Flax, whose e-mails were lost — remember, now, six additional people’s e-mails in addition to Lerner were lost. “An IRS official whose emails were ‘lost’ visited the White House frequently during the agencyÂ’s targeting of conservatives and met with a top assistant to President Obama who exchanged confidential information on conservative groups with the IRS.

“The IRS recently claimed that it lost emails from Nikole Flax, who served as chief of staff to former IRS commissioner Steven Miller. Flax was one of seven IRS employees including ex-official Lois Lerner whose emails to and from White House officials and other Obama administration agencies were purportedly deleted and could not be handed over to congressional investigators.

“On May 8, 2013, the day that Flax made her last recorded White House visit, Lerner sent Flax an email asking for advice about a plan to coordinate with the Department of Justice to criminally prosecute conservative activists. ‘I think we should do it,’ Flax replied on May 9. ‘also need to include CI [Criminal Investigation Division], which we can help coordinate. Also, we need to reach out to FEC [Federal Election Commision]. Does it make sense to consider including them in this or keep it separate?'”

These two were actively agreeing to criminally prosecute Tea Party activists who wanted to create 501(c)(3)s. Criminally prosecute. For what? Dissenting against Obama. All they wanted to do was raise money for Tea Party candidates, and that resulted in e-mails back and forth between Nikole Flax and Lois Lerner as they salivated about the possibility of criminally prosecuting these conservative activists.

“Nikole Flax held personal meetings with a top assistant to President Obama and also colluded with Lerner to prosecute conservative activists. Flax made 31 visits to the White House between July 12, 2010 and May 8, 2013, according to White House visitor logs. FlaxÂ’s visits started in the early days of the IRS targeting program.” Remember they tried to tell us that it was just a couple of rogue agents Cincinnati? And look what we’ve now learned this was.

Again, I’m at a loss to adequately express my incredulity. This is unacceptable. This is 10 times worse than anything Richard Nixon ever thought about doing, and that’s all Nixon ever did was think about doing. He never did any of this. He thought about it, never did it. He salivated, he dreamed about doing it. These people did it. David French, American Center for Law and Justice, has written a piece, “No Wonder the IRS is Losing E-mails,” and does a good job of expressing incredulity and so forth.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: By the way, folks, Nikole Flax, again, visited the White House more than a dozen times between July of 2010 and April of 2013, according to Politico. Guess when the targeting of the Tea Party began? August of 2010, one month after her visits begin. I’ve said all along that there’s not gonna be a smoking gun linking Obama to this. There doesn’t need to be. These people were going to the White House to keep them informed. I guarantee you Flax wasn’t getting instructions. She might have been getting some guidelines, but listen to her and Lerner talking back and forth to each other. They knew what they wanted to do. They didn’t have to be told, given orders by anybody to go do this. It’s who they are. And our side simply doesn’t seem able to appreciate exactly what they have been and are up against.

Here’s Jim Temple, Texas, as we start on the phones. Thank you so much for waiting, Jim. Hello.

CALLER: Good afternoon, Rush. How you doing? You sound great this afternoon.

RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.

CALLER: Longtime listener, first-time caller and fellow Sacramentoan.

RUSH: My adopted hometown. I love it there.

CALLER: (laughing) I just wanted to make a couple of quick points about these lost IRS e-mails. I managed data centers for 30 some years in the health care industry and the banking industry and the defense industry. I ran a data center for TRW for quite a while.

RUSH: For fans of Jay-Z and Beyonce, what is a data center?

CALLER: Oh. That’s where all the computers’ servers are stored.

RUSH: Okay.

CALLER: Thank you. Hey, I just wanted to reaffirm — and I apologize in advance if the point’s already been made —

RUSH: No, no.

CALLER: — that unless your data center is run by Larry, Mo, and Curly, there are so many levels of backups performed that it’s mind-boggling. Any computer attached to the network is automatically backed up. Those backups are backed up every night.

RUSH: Would you recycle a corrupt server?

CALLER: Well, you see, I’m not sure exactly what hard drive it is that’s failed. They haven’t gone into that much detail. Was it a hard drive on her personal computer, a notebook, or was it a server hard drive?

RUSH: It’s now both. It’s the hard drive on her computer, and the server, the backup, everything’s gone. They recycled the server ’cause it was corrupt. Her hard drive crashed. The server was corrupt, which means it had bad sectors, and they just threw it away, recycled it.

CALLER: You’re talking about an order of probability here that’s astronomical of that actually ever happening. And besides, like I was saying, these things are backed up interactively every day. They’re backed up nightly. Every week at the minimum the backups are copied to tape, and the tapes are taken off site.

RUSH: Precisely, and especially at White House type levels, no question.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Courtland, New York, this is Bill. Great to have you, sir. Welcome to the program.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. It’s a pleasure to speak with you.

RUSH: Pleasure to have you, sir.

CALLER: Yeah, I’ve got a question regarding this IRS, Lois Lerner thing. I was thinking about this, and most of us live in Realville and since you’re the mayor, I thought I’d ask for your guidance. If I’m audited by the IRS, do you think it’s a valid excuse to say that I recycled my hard drive?

RUSH: Only if every receipt you’re relying on is on it. I would do it, and then I would say, “Well, look, I didn’t mean for it to happen. I prepare for an audit every year and I was getting ready for it and my hard drive crashed and then the server where they’re backed up, somebody threw it away. I would love to, I just don’t have it anymore.” And then they’ll disallow it, and that’s when you say, “Lois Lerner.” And then after that you’re gonna have to call Tax Defense Partners ’cause they’re gonna throw it right back in your face and say it doesn’t fly. No, seriously, don’t try it. You know it won’t work for you.

CALLER: What if my intentions are good?

RUSH: The IRS doesn’t care about your intentions. They can’t be sidetracked by your intentions. Everybody’s intentions are honorable and fair, that’s what they would hear. I seriously — I gotta be very careful here. I was making a joke. I would not try it. I know it’s tempting. I know it’s something you’d love to say if it ever happened, but the IRS, I don’t know if you know, the IRS demands that you keep your tax records for six years in case they do come auditing you. You are required by law to keep your records for six years. I don’t know what the law says about Lois Lerner keeping her e-mails. I understand you’re making a rhetorical point, but I — and it was stated earlier by a caller — I have a very important, powerful voice. I cannot even accidentally mislead people.

Look, I don’t need somebody telling an IRS agent, “Rush Limbaugh told me to tell you that I threw away my server and that my hard drive crashed.” (laughing) So don’t try it, as tempting as it would be. What I have found with taxes, I’m audited, and it’s the one — well, this is changing. It used to be the one instance where you’re guilty at the outset and have to prove your innocence. The presumption is you’re guilty. It’s been my experience. No matter what I’ve told them, I’m lying, and they make me prove what I’m saying 14 different ways for every day in question.