Even though the IRS claims it lost all of Lerner’s emails due to a hard drive crash, as least some of those appear at some point to have been archived (the ones from 2009): As reported,
“House congressional investigators have requested emails from 2009 to 2011, when the IRS division led by Lerner began targeting for extra scrutiny Tea Party and other conservative nonprofits applying for tax-exempt status.
The IRS had a contract with email-achiever Sonasoft in effect at least through 2009, according to the website FedSpending.org.
That same year, the company tweeted: “The IRS uses Sonasoft to back up their servers, why wouldn’t you choose them to protect your servers?”
And a document on the company website suggests its system “archives all email content and so reduces the risk of non-compliance with legal, regulatory and other obligations to preserve critical business content.”
However, whether Sonasoft’s government contract extended through 2011 or if the company had the capacity to save every email from such a large agency remains unclear.”
The saga continues.