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Lois Lerner’s hard drive “more than likely crashed due to an impact of some sort,” according to Congressional testimony submitted today from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).

According to the testimony, Lerner’s laptop stopped communicating with the IRS server on Saturday June 11, 2011, between 5:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. On Monday June 13, 2011, Lerner reported the laptop inoperable. Her laptop was then serviced by an IRS IT staff technician and a Hewlett-Packard contractor:

“When asked about the possible cause of the hard drive failure, the HP technician opined that heat-related failures are not seen often, and based on the information provided to him, the hard drive more than likely crashed due to an impact of some sort. However, because the HP technician did not examine the hard drive as part of his work on the laptop, it could not be determined why it crashed.”

Lerner Hard Drive Contained “Scoring on the top platter”

On July 19, 2011, Lerner asked IRS IT to try to recover the lost data in order to find “personal information.” The hard drive was passed from the IRS IT technician to the IRS Criminal Investigation Division (IRS-CI). The attempt to recover the data was not successful.

Curiously, the IRS-CI technician “noted some scoring on the top platter of the drive, and he believed there were additional steps that could have been taken to attempt to recover data. IRS IT management determined the extra effort to recover data from Ms. Lerner’s hard drive was not worth the expense.”