White House Emails Case Nearing Settlement - recovering Bush/Cheney 'missing' email

[TacticalPeek]

Maybe We’ll Learn How All the CIA Leak Cover-Up Emails Disappeared?

By: emptywheel Saturday December 12, 2009 7:47 pm


Since some folks are ruining a perfectly good politics-free Trash thread by talking shop, I feel obliged to weigh in with politics. So I’ll point to this report that the Administration may finally be willing to explain how all of OVP’s emails from the time period when Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby were arranging a cover-up of the Plame outing disappeared–poof!!!–from the White House servers. (h/t RB)

"The years-long legal battle over millions of missing White House emails from George W. Bush’s presidency may finally be drawing to a close. “We are very close to a final settlement,” Anne Weismann, chief counsel for the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), tells Mother Jones. “We have been in negotiations with for months, and I think they really want out from under all this.”

CREW and another nonprofit, the National Security Archive, first sued the Bush administration in September of 2007, hoping to force the White House to recover missing emails and implement an effective archiving system that would prevent important presidential records from being lost or misplaced in the future. But the litigation has been on hold since March 2009, when the Obama administration and the plaintiffs jointly agreed to pursue a settlement.

Details of the agreement are still being finalized, but Weismann says CREW expects to prevail in the three areas that are most important to her organization: “restoration of missing emails, assurances going forward that the White House has an appropriate and effective electronic record-keeping system, and information about what happened.”

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/12/12/maybe-well-learn-how-all-the-cover-up-emails-disappeared/


http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/12/exclusive-white-house-emails-case-nearing-settlement

[boppers]

1. "restoration of missing emails"???

So, they weren't actually missing, then?

[SpiralHawk]

2. "Smirk." - xCommander AWOL (R)

[SpiralHawk]

3. "Sneer." - xVP Dickie 'Five-Military-Deferments' Cheney (R)

[boppers]

4. "Giggle" -sysadmins everywhere with backup tapes.

You have to be *extremely* good at what you do to hide all traces of an email. In this case, it looks like they were morons, being led by morons, so even if the email bodies were lost, there's still envelopes permanently archived, and mail routers with message passing archives.

[barbtries]

5. could it lead to criminal prosecutions?

i know i'm dreaming. the gwbush admin was so corrupt in so many ways. i keep hoping.

[tavalon]

6. Sorry, we are looking ahead because we think war crimes or even basic Nixonian crimes

are no longer worthy of prosecution.

[Moochy]

10. War Crimes + Crimes Against Humanity reside in the lower rear quadrants.

When jingoistically moving ever upward and forward you can't see what's back there. It's a real blind spot of corporatist-positivists.

[QC]

15. You are not being forwardy looky enough, n/t

[DavidDvorkin]

7. Does "restoration" mean "release"?

I want to see what's in them.

[jtrockville]

8. No, I think it means they'll be recovered from hard drives.

They had been deleted, but like just about everything, can (and should) be recovered. I doubt we'll ever see them.

[DavidDvorkin]

11. If they're not released, they might as well not be recoverd

I understand what "recovered" means in the technical sense, but I want to know if they will then be released. Otherwise, why go through the exercise of recovering them?

Maybe historians will get to see them in a hundred years, but we need them now.

[jtrockville]

12. Maybe the investigation into who outed a US spy can be reopened?

Aside from that, the WH is in violation of the Presidential Records Act if these aren't recovered.

[DavidDvorkin]

13. No one ever seems to get prosecuted for violating government records-keeping laws

Maybe the laws are toothless. Or maybe no one prosecutes for them.

[jtrockville]

14. On the other hand, treason (outing a spy during wartime),

should be pursued.

[jtrockville]

9. Time period for "missing" emails is significant:

From CREW's website:

...

The deletion of millions of email beginning in March 2003 coupled with the White House’s destruction of back-up copies of those deleted email mean that there are no back-up copies of emails deleted during the period March 2003 through October 2003. The significance of this time-period cannot be overstated: the U.S. went to war with Iraq, top White House officials leaked the covert identity of Valerie Plame Wilson and the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into their actions.

...
http://www.citizensforethics.org/node/30775
(emphasis is CREW's, not mine)

I think it's also important to remember the circumstances under which it was discovered that emails where "missing". Patrick Fitzgerals discovered it when he was investigating the outing of a US CIA agent during wartime:

...

"It looks like Karl Rove may well have destroyed evidence that implicated him in the White House's orchestrated efforts to leak Valerie Plame Wilson's covert identity to the press in retaliation against her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson," Sloan said last week. "Special Counsel Fitzgerald should immediately reopen his investigation into whether Rove took part in the leak, as well as whether he obstructed justice in the ensuing leak investigation."

...
http://www.citizensforethics.org/node/27707