Wednesday afternoon, Huffington Post's Sam Stein, whose track record of fundamentally dishonest reporting and refusing to admit the obvious even when caught red-handed goes back at least six years, used a tweet to promote an excuse even a six year-old wouldn't dare try to use on his or her parents.
Behold Stein's tweet, which, modified to defend the indefensible in the Obama administration, essentially goes like this: "See, Chris told his parents that the dog ate his homework. Doesn't that help prove that our dog might really have eaten my homework?" But instead of a dog, it's the big, bad IT monster which crashes computer hard drives (HT Twitchy):
For those who are having a hard time keeping up with Obama administration skulduggery — and who isn't? — here is some of what the Hill reported earlier today concerning the EPA's "the dog ate our homework, too" exercise (the linked story has apparently been updated since Stein first linked to it):
Another agency tells Congress: File not found
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the IRS share a problem: officials say they cannot provide the emails a congressional committee has requested because an employee’s hard drive crashed.
EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy confirmed to the House Oversight Committee Wednesday that her staff is unable to provide lawmakers all of the documents they have requested on the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska, because of a 2010 computer crash.
... The revelation came less than two weeks after IRS officials told Congress that Lois Lerner, the official at the center of the controversy over the targeting of conservative tax-exempt groups, also suffered from a hard drive crash that makes it difficult to comply with records requests.
The committee suspects that Phillip North, who worked for the EPA in Alaska, decided with his colleagues to veto the proposed Pebble Mine near Bristol Bay in 2009, before the agency even began researching its potential impacts on the environment.
Committee staffers have been trying for about a year to interview North, but he has been in New Zealand and refuses to cooperate, they said.
“We have tried to serve a subpoena on your former employee and we have asked for the failed hard drive from this Alaskan individual who now is in New Zealand, and seems to never be returning,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the committee’s chairman, said Wednesday.
So now we even have shades of the Bill Clinton administration, which was especially effective at ensuring that potentially damaging witnesses fled the country.
Getting back to Stein's excuse-making, the New York Post's Kyle Smith explained on Saturday what the IRS is now really claiming, in dog-homework terms even Sam Stein might understand:
The thing about dogs eating homework is, it could actually happen. This can’t.
This is “The dog ate my hard drive, broke into another building, ate the backup of the hard drive, then broke into six other top officials’ offices and ate their hard drives also.”
What we learned about the IRS this week is that there is an obvious criminal coverup that comes in addition to the possible underlying crimes. Prosecutions need to be brought against all of those involved.
Why isn’t this happening already?
Beyond all of that, as tweeter "Infinius est" notes: "E-Mails are stored on centralized servers, not employees' hard drives."
So no, Sam Stein, a computer crash at the EPA, which itself is very unlikely, doesn't do anything to render the IRS's excuse-making credible.
Tweeter "S D Winkler" may have identified the next strategy: "by that logic HHS setting PCs on fire in the parking lot further proves IRS' innocence."
I wouldn't rule that out, especially for computers containing Obamacare-related information, both as an action the administration might take and as a new argument Stein would advance if it really were to happen.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
