Over at Hot Air, they have an article up about the IRS Commissioner trying to spin email retention laws. Apparently he believes emails are not an official record. Well, yes, actually they are. Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey dissects this claim:

That’s an odd argument to make, since federal law on record retention in other contexts explicitly require others to retain e-mail data as a record-keeping device. Earlier, I wrote about that at The Week:

The claim that the IRS recycles its backup tapes every six months is equally ludicrous. The federal government has more strict expectations for publicly held corporations. Sarbanes-Oxley regulations passed more than a decade ago specifically require retention of email data for five years, and make the kind of destruction claimed by the IRS in this instance a crime punishable by 20 years in prison.

The IRS claim raised eyebrows at the National Archives and Records Administration, which is tasked with preserving important federal records, calling itself “concerned” that a hard drive failure would wipe out two years’ worth of what should be permanent records. The IRS’s own manual made it clear that the storage of email was important enough to have permanent backups of their data. “IRS offices will not store the official recordkeeping copy of email messages that are federal records ONLY on the electronic mail system,” and even went so far as to require hard copies “for record-keeping purposes.”

The issue isn’t that some things should be kept in hard copy; it’s that the electronic copy of all e-mail is supposed to be retained for a much longer period, as well as storing important records by hard copy. That’s certainly the expectation that the federal government has of us.

Indeed. No one is buying this from the IRS. Nobody believes them.  The longer the IRS persists with this set of lies the more credence they are giving to the idea there is a cover up going on and the assignment of an independent counsel. Besides, even the White House admitted all their work was done in emails. Can you imagine the White House using this same excuse? Well, yeah actually at this point people probably can — Transparency!

Related Flashback to Jay ‘I’ve never Lied’ Carney:  Jay Carney 2011 vs 2013: All Our Work Done In Email (video)