Somewhere, Richard Nixon is chuckling bitterly to himself. When it comes to burying scandal, Tricky Dick was an amateur compared to the gang in the White House today. Obama and Company may well succeed in weaponizing the IRS to hobble his opposition in the 2012 election and escaping the second article of impeachment that Nixon faced.

You can forget about unleashing data recovery experts on the hard drive containing Lois Lerner’s emails – that hard drive has been destroyed. Richard Bade reports in Politico:

Ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s crashed hard drive has been recycled, making it likely the lost emails of the lightening rod in the tea party targeting controversy will never be found, according to multiple sources.

“We’ve been informed that the hard drive has been thrown away,” Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, said in a brief hallway interview.

Two additional sources told POLITICO the same late Wednesday, citing IRS officials.

Odd, isn’t it, that nobody mentioned this before. Supposedly, recycling is standard procedure for damaged hard drives, and we all know how important recycling is to Saving the Planet. Just try using that excuse, that you recycled your receipts, when the IRS audits you.

Meanwhile, the White House is claiming that they have no records of any suspicious emails from Lerner to people there. The AP reports:

The White House said Wednesday it has found no emails between any person in the executive office of the president and a top Internal Revenue Service official who has been connected to the improper scrutiny of political groups.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said the White House searched for all communications between the former IRS official, Lois Lerner, and executive office personnel. "We found zero emails," he said.

He said the search discovered three emails in which a third party emailed both Lerner and executive office staff. He said one was spam and two others were from a person seeking tax assistance. Carney said those emails have been provided to congressional investigators.

Without evidence to the contrary, Congress is powerless to root around White House records and find emails from Lerner.

All that’s left now to truth-seekers is the NSA data, that supposedly records all emails, at least in metadata form. It would be highly ironic of the government’s spy agency were to be the undoing of the cover-up. Expect to see heated arguments about why the NSA data must not be made available. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Meanwhile, expect the three broadcast television networks to continue to avoid the topic on their even news shows. The low information crowd has no inkling this is anything but a “phony scandal.”