White House adviser Karl Rove, who was at the center of the U.S. attorney scandal, professing convenience, used his nongovernment email address for 95 percent of his communications.

When investigators found Rove’s deputy at the White House, J. Scott Jennings, had used his account provided by the Republican National Committee to discuss the firing of Bud Cummins, a U.S. attorney in Arkansas, they sought more records. However, as many as 22 million emails disappeared from the RNC’s servers.

Issa chalked up the loss of the emails to the GOP’s use of outdated software such as Lotus Notes, implying the entire investigation was a waste of money. “Are we simply going on a fishing expedition at $40,000 to $50,000 a month?” he asked.

Fast-forward to 2014. During his investigation of the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups, Republicans led by Darrell Issa focused their inquiry on the head of the agency’s exempt division, Lois Lerner. As part of its investigation the committee demanded her email correspondents over a number of years, which were provided by the Treasury Department, save for a batch of 30,000 emails from 2009–2011 after her hard drive purportedly crashed.

Lerner asserted her Fifth Amendments rights not to testify before the committee, which resulted in the House of Representatives declaring her in contempt of Congress. When it came to the missing emails, whereas during the Bush years, computer errors were an acceptable reason for error, in the Obama administration lost emails were evidence of criminality. In a sharply worded letter to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, “Congress passed the Federal Records Act (FRA) to preserve key documents — such as those that were stored on Lerner’s hard drive — for production to congressional investigators and other stakeholders, including historians and FOIA requesters.” Issa continued, “The FRA requires agencies to make and preserve records of agency decisions, policies, and essential transactions, and to take steps to safeguard against the loss of agency records.” This was a marked difference from his stance on lost emails during the Bush years.