Like a lot folks, I’m skeptical about the…accuracy…of the IRS’ lately claim that they can’t find Lois Lerner’s emails from before 2011.

My skepticism flows from a number of sources:

• Why are they only now discovering the loss, a year after all that documentation was subpoenaed by House oversight committees?
• The IRS claims a hard drive crash is at the heart of the loss—on what basis are we to believe that a single hard drive held all those documents?
• The IRS’ hard drives—actually, the material stored on them—like all government hard drives/data, and like all such materials in the private, competitive sector, are backed up nightly: what are we to believe happened to all those backups?
• Are we expected to believe that a professional IT crew would be so careless as to leave a single hard drive at the core of such a critical system? That they would leave all those backups at mercy of a single point of failure?

Note to those of you who believe the IRS’ claim: perhaps I can interest you in some beachfront property north of Santa Fe.