“Fool me once…” So far, no arrests have been made in the IRS scandal, no criminal charges filed. So if you work for a federal agency in the Obama administration, why not claim that you can’t cooperate with an investigation by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee because your computer’s hard drive crashed?
From the Blaze:
Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) on Monday made yet another request to the federal government for details about a crashed hard drive that may have contained information allowing criminal charges to be brought against a federal official.
Issa’s newest letter concerns the hard drive of April Sands, a former employee at the Federal Election Commission who resigned in the spring after admitting to violations of the Hatch Act. That law puts restrictions on the ability of government officials to conduct political activities while on the job, or from government offices.
Issa noted that while Sands admitted to violating the law, the FEC just recently told Congress that it could not recover her hard drive, which made it impossible to seek criminal charges against her.
“Recent information obtained by the committee suggests that the FEC OIG could not pursue criminal prosecution for the misconduct because the attorney’s hard drive had been recycled by the FEC,” Issa’s letter said.
Sands’ emails and Twitter messages show a clear preference for a second term for Barack Obama in the 2012 election Before the election, she tweeted:
Our #POTUS’s birthday is August 4. He’ll be 51. I’m donating at least $51 to give him the best birthday present ever: a second term.
In another tweet, she said that anyone supporting Republicans is her “enemy.”
The alleged FEC hard drive failure is now the third high-profile technical glitch that House Republicans have probed in the last few weeks. In June, Issa’s committee was told by EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy that some emails from her department relating to a decision blocking a proposed mining operation in Alaska may have been lost.
In the meantime, “My hard drive crashed” is likely to become the new excuse du jour of schoolchildren who arrive in class unprepared.
