Apparently the massive 3000-page document dump from the Justice Department earlier this week was missing 18 crucial days of emails from late November and early December 2006 – the time right before the questionable firings occured.
This raises all sorts of questions:
How bad does this look for the administration?
Is it possible that this was a simple mistake?
Were they hoping the bulk of the document dump would mask the gap?
Now that they’ve released all these other documents, is there any way they can avoid releasing these emails as well?
There seems to be some delay in posting the contents of today’s white house press conference.. Here’s a video of Tony Snow fielding a question on the gap.
A fair and balanced paraphrase: “I don’t know why there’s a gap. Why don’t you ask justice?”
I can’t believe this was a mistake, but what were they thinking? They can’t possibly have hoped a gap in the most important time period wouldn’t be noticed.
The whole point of a 3000 page dump was so that Congressional investigators would be so overwhelmed with the sheer volume and the need to check it all that they’d miss things like that. About half the documents released were transcripts of hearings, which are mostly publicly available anyway and are generally irrelevant in the first place.
What Fielding et.al. didn’t take into account was this newfangled interweb thingie and the several thousands of rather involved people (quite a few over at Talking Points Memo) who actually began to take the document dump apart as it was being released the other night.
I think the gap was to let the Justice Department go very carefully over those e-mails and get their answers ready - getting all their ducks in a row before the e-mails are made public.
The reason for the gap can easily be justified - “we were confirming that there was nothing classified in the e-mails before we released them to the public” or something in that vein.
What would be more exciting is if some White House computer nerd appears at a press conference waving his slide rule like a sword and saying “None of your beeswax. You want those e-mails, come and get them! But you’ll never manage to break my encryption scheme.”
I loved how one reporter asked, if Bush was never brought into the loop, how he can make a claim of executive privilege under the premise that he needs his advisors to feel free to give him all the information they can so that he can make good judgments.
I don’t think that will fly. Why would personnel decisions in the Justice Department be classified? And why did that particular batch of email need further review?
From looking at the docs on the Justice Department website it doesn’t look like there’s any sort of ID stamp on the emails to determine if some have just been deleted. Perhaps the missing emails were held back to cull any that might be embarrassing – they might have thought it would take a week or two to sift through the dump and by the time anyone noticed the gap they would have finished cleaning them up.
Snow really just happens to know, off the top of his head, what the President does or does not recall? Dollars to doughnuts, this response is something a bunch of lawyers worked out rather than something Snow was told by the President.
That entire transcript is laughable, with Snow doing his darnedest to parse the difference between an “interview” and “testimony”, and attempting to characterize any effort at transparency as a “spectacle”.
It’s similar to the argument they’re making about the Bush’s authority over the attorneys: Only the President has the authority to hire and fire at will, but the President didn’t know anything about these particular hirings and firings.