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(Emphasis mine.)
Source: GOP Braces For Testimony Fight, Likely Gonzales Exit - POLITICO
Is this turning into the Ghost of Watergate Tapes ?
I predict that somewhere down the road the most specifically damaging emails will be lost, not because of any criminal act by anyone in the administration, but because of an error.
It’s the standard drop back position of the Republican Party. “We are not crooks, we are just really stupid.”
Tris
Heh, I can sort of picture the administration finding some poor IT guy to take the blame for loosing emails as sort of a modern day equivalent to Rose Mary Woods.
Were the emails given to the House Commitee because they subpeoned (sp?) them or did the DOJ just give them up voluntarily? And if the former, did the subpeona specifically request emails from the dates in question?
Also, are we sure that the Judicary Commitee (which, according to the article posted the emails) doesn’t have the emails for the dates in question and simply didn’t release them to the public for whatever reason?
Criminal acts are pretty easy to commit when you mess with white house emails:
CREW ASKS FOR HOUSE INVESTIGATION INTO WHITE HOUSE VIOLATIONS OF PRESIDENTIAL RECORDS ACT
Or, it was so they could do a typically Bushie “Look, we gave you 3,000 pages, what MORE do you want?” long enough to shred (and e-shred) those 18 days.
-Joe
Am I the only one who suspects those 18 days of missing email correspondence could have other goodies, unrelated to the current scandal, but damning in other regards, in them?
Tony Snow’s logic is becoming so twisted that he is beginning to look like a pretzel.
No.
I think Gonzales is going to let the Alaskan computer klutz come in and process the missing emails.
This is certainly suspicious though other explanations are possible. I can imagine that there could be communication about current legal cases which if allowed to get out could jeopardize a prosecution. There are enough things which can and should legitimately remain out of the public eye that you can’t discount that possibility. But given the fact that the dates involved are central to this scandal nobody would believe it even if true.
Only three items seems pretty hard to prosecute on. Unless they can prove a fairly consistent rerouting around the Whitehouse system, it’s pretty easy for the Whitehouse to say that they forgot to use the system that one time or two times.
The House Judiciary commitee doesn’t need to make all it’s preceedings public though, does it? If the DOJ is concerned about the sensitivity of some of the emails (all of the emails in a given date range :dubious: ) might harm ongoing cases, then it seems there must be a way to allow investigators to see the messages and validate that they need to be kept underwraps without making their contents public knowledge.
3,000 pages is nothing. That’s less than a box of documents. I can blow through that, even with emails where I have to read every page, in a couple hours. (And for the record, in my time doing document reviews, I’ve reviewed thousands of boxes.)
To be clear, in any typical litigation, even one that isn’t at all document intensive, you’ll have a couple boxes of documents. That they’ve produced only 3,000 pages tells me that there is a massive amount of information they’ve withheld.
Nope. You review everything before anything goes out, and you don’t hold back the critical documents to do a more thorough review. If you need time, you hold back the entire production. Otherwise, you’ve simply highlighted the documents you’re concerned about.
Yes; you can redact the sensitive information; you can enter some kind of agreement regarding who can see it; etc., etc. Tons of ways to deal with it other than withholding.
If so, the President ought to get better lawyers. I can do better than that in my sleep.
Good freaking luck with that. If they lose the emails, a forensic tech can find them again in minutes, unless they’ve wiped them. And if they’ve wiped them, it wasn’t an accident, it was deliberate spoliation.
Am I a bad person for thinking gleefully that this could bring the administration down?
No, but unfortunately without knowing what’s in the emails themselves, you’re at a dead end. Even though you might be able to prove that the Whitehouse purposefully and maliciously deleted emails, I don’t think the public would be willing to kick out the president just for that.
At most, I think it would just help stink up the Republican party during the next election even more than now.
Spun correctly, I disagree. We don’t need to know what’s in the emails. We only need to know where they stopped – should we talk to the President – and where they picked up again.
We are, for better or worse, a tabloid society. We believe it is our constitutional right to know our neighbor’s business. So if the President (particularly this fellow, with his history of “trust me, they totally had WMDs”) says, you can’t see what I said about the issue, we’ll think he’s hiding something, just like Howard K. Stern and the whole Anna Nicole baby-daddy thing.
Yeah, but what punishment do you think would be handed out for “deleting e-mail”? I just don’t think the mass populace would be willing to kick out the president or jail him over something tangental to the issue.
Unfortunately, most people seem to prefer waiting for a smoking gun than to go ahead when what’s got is good enough.
Deleting emails (and going outside the White House email system, as they seem to have also done) is a violation of the Presidential Records Act, which was passed after the Watergate debacle. It requires all WH communications to be recorded and preserved, and the WH email system records a copy of every email sent on it in storage. Going into that storage and erasing emails is a non-ambiguous violation of federal law, as is using private email for official communications, as seems to be the case with the outside “@gwb43.com” addresses that some of the USAttorney communications were sent on (addresses which were supplied by and paid for by the Republican National Committee).
An 18 day gap? I can’t believe it! It’s as if they WANT to invoke the memory of Watergate. The first thing I thought of when I saw the thread title was RoseMary Woods and the infamous 18 1/2 minute gap (long before I even opened it and got to Airman Door’s entry).
Not only doesn’t this administration have any sense of avoiding The Appearance of Impropriety, they apparently lack a Sense of Irony as well.
Yes, and committing perjury in front of congress is 100% illegal as well, but you’ll note that Clinton stayed in the Whitehouse just fine. I agree that it’s a perfectly reasonable law to convict someone for, I’m just saying that I doubt that anyone would actually try to bring a conviction against the President of the United States over something like it. Short of murder, theft, ballot stuffing, or shagging little boys, I just don’t think you’re ever going to be able to boot the president regardless of how unpopular they might be.
That was a foolish mistake.
If they’d gone for a 911 day gap, the nation would have rallied in their support. 