>>There was a time when political peccadilloes were distinguished from the criminal kind.

We can agree that crashing hard drives may be convenient and that an IRS that requires small and large business to keep records ought to observe the same discipline itself- but that does not prove that there are smoking gun emails in the lost subset. IMHO the spoliation argument seems unlikely when the other end of communications remains intact. Apparently hundreds of thousands of emails have been provided from other end of email conduits that might contain evidence and the White House, that did not experience any crashes, says there are zero emails between Lerner and the President's office during the period when her end was lost. A reasonable person is going to assume shoddy practice rather than connivance in the loss of Lerner's end of the email trail. Alternatively if it turns out that a secret email server was used to try to hide evidence as per earlier practice, there will be a major problem.