Mr. Gohmert and fellow Texas Republican Rep. Bill H. Flores introduced a bill that would pay $1 million for producing the missing emails or $500,000 for information about who destroyed the emails. “And don’t forget the other — not just the carrot but the stick,” Mr. Gohmert said of the legislation. “We reduce everybody’s salary in the IRS 20 percent until the emails are produced.”
The salary cuts are likely to be effective at encouraging lower-level employees to come forward with any actions they took in good faith, but those actions will probably not reveal anything useful. The bounty may attract attention from outside contractors to check their backup tapes in storage, but honestly, I doubt the emails are recoverable at this point; the physical media on which they were stored has likely been destroyed.
That said -- identifying, say, the technicians who tried to recover Lerner's "personal files" from her hard drive would be very useful. They would be able to testify what Lerner told them, what she asked them to retrieve, and what the actual drive looked like -- was it physically damaged? How many bad sectors? Was it still operable if plugged into a computer?
