"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."

According to Auric Goldfinger in "Goldfinger", before he had James Bond tied up to the table to be cut into pieces by a laser. Six is well beyond the point of coincidence.

So how do you explain six crashed hard drives containing emails sought by Congress in the IRS scandal?

It shouldn't have happened. During the period in question, the IRS was paying a contractor to preserve its email:

It’s a cover-up — obstruction of justice — and everybody knows it, because the subpoenaed e-mails simply cannot be “lost”:

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said it can’t provide emails sent between 2009 and 2011 that were requested by congressional investigators because of hard drive crashes.

The agency said that emails stored on dead drives were lost forever because its email backup tapes were recycled every six months, and employees were responsible for keeping their own long-term archives.
The IRS had a contract with email backup service vendor Sonasoft starting in 2005, according to FedSpending.org, which lists the contract as being for “automatic data processing services.” Sonasoft’s motto is “email archiving done right,”and the company lists the IRS as a customer.
In 2009, Sonasoft even sent out a Tweet advertising its work for the IRS.

We therefore know for a fact that the e-mails could not have been accidentally “lost.” We also know for a fact that Lois Lerner’s hard-drive was erased within 10 days of a letter being sent from House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp inquiring about the targeting of conservative groups by the IRS. We furthermore know for a fact that Nikole Flax — the former chief of staff to the IRS director, whose e-mails were also supposedly “lost” — visited the White House 35 times after Flax talked to Lerner about targeting conservative groups.

Two new pieces of news in this dump since I last wrote, and sort of gave the IRS of the benefit of the doubt, based on my own experience.

First, the IRS had a contractor in place to archive email 5 years prior to time the emails went missing. Has anyone looked in Sonasoft's archives for the missing emails? Or was this a "make work" contract where no actual results were expected?

Second, Lois Lerner reported her hard drive crash exactly 10 days after the House Republicans started asking about the targeting of conservative groups.  Did that hard drive crash, or was is driven into the wall