Sarah Palin and the Strange Case of the Missing IRS Emails

In spite of the obviously suspicious disappearance of key documentation, it isn’t hard to find partisan defenders. A brief internet search will find thousands of examples. A few examples typify the reflexive defensiveness:

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• She “wasn’t under investigation for targeting her political opponents and using the powers of government at the time…”In fairness, it is true that we are talking about missing messages from years ago, before there was any allegation of wrongdoing.
• “But none of that matters to he troglodytes that write at Mediaite and their readers…” This attack seems to be on the media who report the news, rather than on the suspicious activity itself.
• When “the media gets excited over another conjured up smoking gun” it simply “continues to blow up in their faces.”

Whenever key evidence simply disappears from an arena of controversy, alarm bells go off. These missing emails happen to be a case in point.

The first reaction was, itself suspicious. An administrative director is quoted. “I don’t have any information on the missing documents,” said Linda Perez.

No information?

Ms Perez insists she sent urgent requests to a Technology Services Department charged with keeping documents. She “asked them if they would search their search criteria and see if they can explain or come up with any reason for this.” Well, that’s something, I suppose.

We have to ask a more basic question. If that large a gap in the official record exists, how many other key pieces of evidence are missing? What other email messages have vanished?

When a public official suddenly resigns, and so much documentation turns out to be missing, is it any wonder suspicions will spread?

There were supposed backups of the missing messages. They were automatically deleted. The Anchorage Daily News quotes a spokesperson for Sarah Palin’s successor as Governor: “It’s my understanding that Yahoo has an auto-delete system, so the records weren’t recoverable.”

But there is another side. There are explanations.

Is it fair to cast doubt on the integrity of former Governor Sarah Palin over those lost emails?

There were a lot of email documents that were released: more than 24 thousand pages. The number lost when she first took office is unknown.

Yes, she was supposed to have been using her official email account from the moment she took office. For three weeks there were no messages on that account. None. Nothing Sent. Nothing received.

The Yahoo account she apparently used instead, in contradiction of state regulation, allows users to delete messages, but keeps those deletions on backup for a time. The “auto-delete” system then destroys all traces. Governor Sarah Palin’s Administrative Director, Linda Perez, really wouldn’t have had any information on the missing emails, in a literal sense. All information had been deleted, then erased.

I dunno. I guess I’d be inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. As her supporters point out, she was not a center of controversy at the time she neglected to use her official account. I suspect there was never a there there.

Still, it does make me wonder what Sarah Palin’s reaction would have been if some official from a Democratic administration was under some suspicion. If, for example, an IRS official was under some sort of investigation and a host of email messages was lost due to some sort of computer crash, what would the former Governor say?

If the computer crash had happened well before there was any hint of controversy, would that matter? If there had been some sort of automatic backup of the lost messages that, in turn, had been automatically deleted, would that have been suspicious? What if that deletion had happened on a schedule that had been set decades before?

One Palin critic speculates that she would have condemned anyone besides herself. He “quotes” her supposed reaction.

Nixon Admin Watergate Communications 18 min gap; Obama Admin Lerner Communications 1,052,000 min gap. Difference? Not even a smidgen.

– Alan Colmes on Sarah Palin’s reaction, June 28, 2014

Yes, Mr. Colmes speculates that Sarah Palin would be completely hypocritical. But let’s face it: he is a liberal cynic.

My bet is Sarah Palin would have been completely understanding.

Completely.

This MadMikesAmerica collaboration was originally published at fairandunbalanced.com.

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