It will be interesting to see if the usual suspects will make their usual cries of protest against House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa for demanding the actual hard drive which the IRS claims makes Los Lerner’s emails inaccessible. Susan Ferrechio reports in the Washington Examiner:

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee ChairmanDarrell Issa on Tuesday issued a subpoena to the Internal Revenue Service, ordering the agency to turn over the hard drive they claim is responsible for wiping out two years of critical email communications.

Anyone claiming that Issa is on a fishing expedition risks the mockery that has greeted the IRS’s claim that the dog ate its homework. There are legions of data recovery experts out there just itching to demonstrate their skills in recovering the emails in question.

Unless, of course, there is a spike driven through the disk itself. That would make the data unrecoverable, but might raise some interesting questions.Just to make sure, Issa is asking for some other materials:

All back-up tapes, external drives, thumb drives, or other storage media the IRS used to capture, archive, back up, or otherwise record e-mails sent or received by Lerner from Jan. 1, 2009, to Sept. 23, 2013.
All hard drives, external drives, thumb drives, and computers Lerner used from Jan. 1, 2009, to Sept.23, 2013.
All electronic communication devices the IRS issued to Lerner from Jan. 1, 2009, to Sept. 23, 2013.
All electronic files, including, but not limited to, .pst files, relating to the IRS e-mail account Lerner used from Jan. 1, 2009, to Sept. 23, 2013.
All documents and communications that Lerner printed and/or stored for Federal Records Act compliance purposes from Jan. 1, 2009 to Sept. 23, 2013.
All documents and communications referring or relating to the production to any congressional committee or member of Congress of e-mail communications sent or received by Lerner from Jan. 1, 2009, to Aug. 2, 2013.
All documents and communications referring or relating to the creation of “Enclosure 3” from the June 13 letter from Leonard Oursler to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden and Ranking Member Orrin Hatch, titled “Description of IRS Email Collection and Production."
All documents and communications between or among IRS employees and employees of any Executive Branch entity referring or relating to the IRS’ production of documents to Congress from May 10, 2013, to the present.
All documents and communications referring or relating to the subpoena issued by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew on Aug. 2, 2013.
All documents and communications referring or relating to the subpoena issued by House Oversight to Koskinen on Feb. 14.

Mysteries make for high interest. And we have quite  mystery here in The Case of the Missing Emails.