The government failed to preserve certain official email messages generated by the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of the President in 2003 as required by law, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald revealed in a January 23 letter (pdf).
The contents and quantity of the missing email is unknown.
In another letter dated January 9 (pdf), Mr. Fitzgerald also disclosed that his Office has received redacted versions of the President’s Daily Brief (”a very discrete amount of material relating to PDBs”) concerning Valerie Plame Wilson or Amb. Joseph Wilson’s trip to Niger. Mr. Libby’s attorney had requested (pdf) all copies of the President’s Daily Brief “in its entirety” from May 2003 through March 2004.
These and several other interesting nuggets emerged in correspondence between the Special Prosecutor and attorneys for I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former aide to Vice President Cheney who is being prosecuted for perjury in connection with the CIA Plame leak investigation. The correspondence was filed in DC District Court on January 31.
While it has apparently proved feasible to declassify portions of PDBs from 2 or 3 years ago, the Central Intelligence Agency still insists that 40 year old PDBs regarding the Vietnam War cannot possibly be declassified.
That dispute is the subject of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by UC Davis Professor Larry Berman. For background on the case see this National Security Archive update.
February 2nd, 2006 at 9:03 pm
OBVIOUSLY, “DELETED” EMAILS CAN BE RECOVERED - IF ANY OF THE RELEVANT HARD DRIVES ARE (PARTIALLY) INTACT…
UNLESS THEY HAVE ALL BEEN PULVERIZED..AND THERE ARE MANY H-DRIVES INVOLVED IN AN EMAIL TRANSMISION/DELIVERY.
February 3rd, 2006 at 9:19 am
Here is the location of the missing e-mails…and hard drives,
“From a tug boat by the river there’s a cement bag just dropping on down. The cement’s just for the weight dear, Bet you Mack is back in town”
February 25th, 2006 at 2:29 pm
Patrick Fitzgerald’s language regarding the missing emails seems to euphemistically allude to a White House IT effort to withhold, destroy or de-archive, and his wording further implies the effort failed. Such failure would not be surprising; the case involves intentional leaks of classified information to multiple reporters, so it should be assumed that official mails crossed the White House firewall.
Once such mails went external, no amount of practical effort could ensure their permanent erasure, and Fitzgerald could’ve then discovered forwarded White House mails from any number of external sources, compared them to the internal White House records, and found proof of discrepancies. In this manner he could build compelling evidence of obstruction, particularly given zealous White House email archival and security policies.
Another strong possibility would be that White House email system was circumvented entirely by using external service providers for communications with reporters. Doing so would yield the advantages of both secrecy and deniability. Using Gmail, for example, would get you under the radar of the multi-layered internal archival system, with its nasty potential for spying on the communications of inter-office rivals, and would provide you with a measure of deniability. That is, unless you made your handle something like karlinkontrol@gmail.com…
February 26th, 2006 at 1:48 am
Interesting that these emails have been so conveniently found — just like the one by Rove re his (version of his) conversation with M.Cooper. I hope Fitzgerald’s group realizes that one can set one’s computer date and time back to what ever date you want, send your email which will have that date/time on it. However, the recipient will have the real time on it as received. So they should check all the computers of all the recipients of all these “newly found” emails.
They may have very interesting very recent dates on them.
Of course that would be falsifying evidence and obstructing justice and our VP would never do a thing like that.
sam