UPDATE 3: Further Froomkin Fun, Same link as in Update 2 in the category of Credit Where Bloggy Credit is Due. Okay, he missed us [sob] but we’ll get over it:
Blogger Josh Marshall writes: “I can say that I am very confident … that orders from Pat Fitzgerald were the reason for the change in White House policy in 2004. So the change in policy was tied to yet another criminal investigation of the White House. And the White House and the key employees in question — namely Karl Rove and people working for him at the White House political office — were specifically on notice not to destroy the emails they sent through the RNC servers. And yet they took affirmative steps to continue destroying them, even after all of this had happened.”It was in October 2004 that Rove suddenly turned over to Fitzgerald a July 2003 e-mail sent to then-deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley, that clearly showed that Rove had spoken to then-Time magazine reporter Cooper. In subsequent testimony, Rove says he had forgotten the conversation, in which he revealed Plames identity, but remembered it after his lawyers found that e-mail.
Michael Isikoff wrote in Newsweek in October 2005: “Why didn’t the Rove e-mail surface earlier? [Rove’s] lawyer says it’s because an electronic search conducted by the White House missed it because the right ’search words’ weren’t used. (The White House and Fitzgerald both declined to comment.)”
You’ve got to wonder which e-mail account Rove used for that e-mail — and how it was discovered.
And Glenn Greenwald blogs for Salon about the multitude of examples of the Bush administration’s “terrible luck with finding documents.”
UPDATE 2: Froom Fingers Fishy Finagling. Noting the “dog ate our emails” excuse for Rover…er I mean “Rove” and Rove alone, the best journalist at WaPo notes that Waxman is So Wise in the Ways of (Computer) Science:
These new, largely unexplained revelations were included in an extraordinary series of letters that Waxman, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent to 17 government agencies yesterday demanding that they preserve any e-mails received from or sent to non-governmental e-mail accounts used by White House staffers.
So Rove’s end of the emails may be swept out, eh? Well, every mail has two ends at very minimum. Chop-block the recipients. It’s like gathering the shotgun pellets after they’ve been fired rather than while they’re still in the shell…but cops do this every damn day of the week. E-cops too. Go read the whole thing. [WaPo link changed to single-page version rather than their split-into-five-jumps-just-to-cheeze-out-extra-page-hits (or maybe discourage readership of material embarassing to their other staffers?) version.]
UPDATE: Document dump, as in the documents themselves, is now up at the House Judiciary Committee website. Document Dump Discussion, comparison, analysis, etc., is already in progress over at Talking Points Memo. That’s fast-moving so get there early (like now). This is live, realtime and messy so don’t jump to any “OMG!!” moments until you’ve read downthread and, preferably, consulted the original to see if it says what the poster says it says. Once burned, ya know.
*****
The parallel stories of Karl’s Missing Emails—the ones going through Republican National Committee channels which we will refer to as the “.com” ones, as well as the newly-discovered-to-be-(oops!)-“missing” from government files, hereafter called the “.gov” scandal—continues apace. This post will be today’s contribution to the effort to herd the Known Facts, the Unknown Facts, the Facts We Don’t Know We Don’t Know, well you get the point, into one place for convenience of readers.
There may be too much detail for some who have been following this right along. Sorry. There may be too little, particularly in links or supporting documentation, for those who are just hearing about this for the first time and still at the “WTF
is the deal with this email shit?” stage. Sorry. We will endeavor to be clear on our sources, with links to reputable outlets who themselves cite sources where possible.
In some cases there will be quotations for which attribution cannot be supplied because they are unable to speak on the record for legal or other reasons. Use whatever standards you usually apply in judging the veracity of these, or else the common sense God gave a goat as my grandmother used to say.
This will be added on to as the day goes on. Some posts may not seem directly related to the topic but mostly likely will as you read along, such as for instance this NYT: Bush Threatens a Veto Over Intel Bill from early this morning. It’s relevant, trust me.
I’ve been stalling putting this up, waiting for Froomkin who has been on fire on this story this week, but he’s late today so instead we will bring you this WaPo lead story: Rove E-Mail Sought by Congress May Be Missing. File this under the “.gov” section, not “.com” as defined above”
A lawyer for the Republican National Committee told congressional staff members yesterday that the RNC is missing at least four years’ worth of e-mail from White House senior adviser Karl Rove that is being sought as part of investigations into the Bush administration, according to the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.GOP officials took issue with Rep. Henry Waxman’s account of the briefing and said they still hope to find the e-mail as they conduct forensic work on their computer equipment. But they acknowledged that they took action to prevent Rove — and Rove alone among the two dozen or so White House officials with RNC accounts — from deleting his e-mails from the RNC server. Waxman (D-Calif.) said he was told the RNC made that move in 2005.
Read that very carefully. Sounds very responsible of the RNC, doesn’t it? Now read it again. “Rove alone” eh? So if Rove picks up the blackberry of his Jack Abramoff mole Susan Ralston and sends a message on her address, it might be among the missing. Oops. You knew better than to read the words “responsible” and “RNC in the same sentence without snickering, didn’tcha?
Oh, there’s also a major data dump due out today. Rumor had it possible as early as last night but if it happened I sure can’t find mention of it anywhere. So that will be another addition as the day goes on.
Front page
So, the RNC's going to find the real email?
Lovely. And I do see the logic. I mean, who’s better placed to “find” stuff than the people who “lost” it?
No authoritarians were tortured in the writing of this post.
Recovering permanently deleted email
My computer guru is recovering deleted email right now as we speak. He’s doing it remotely, that is, he’s sitting at his house office connected to the computer in my office and showing me that deleted emails that I dumped, as in cleaned out the trash, from the deleted file is recoverable. Just to prove the point. Yep, here they are.
Ruth
it really shouldn't take them very long
they’ve known this was coming for weeks, if not since the election. so every minute that passes without the missing emails, .gov or .com, is a minute i’m confident they are pouring over the contents, deciding what and what not to make public. they may be arrogant and stupid, but even they have memories (“remember in june when we planned to scam billions out of the treasury over fake issue X? let’s destroy all the emails that mention that.”) and i know they are furiously employing them now.
Deleted E-mail
Everything’s finally settling around here, which is helpful and avoids distractions and dead ends. Ruth’s comment echoes one I made earlier - it’s actually very useful to think of E-mail as if it were a file somewhere on your computer. When you “delete” the E-mail, it’s roughly the same as “deleting” the file - maybe you can undelete it, maybe you can’t, and maybe it’s on a backup somewhere.
Saying “the messages do not exist” is as dogmatically wrong as saying “the messages must still exist” - neither one is true. Some of the messages are probably recoverable.
BTW, this AP article takes the debate to experts and stuff, and they say much the same thing. It’s possible to recover “deleted” data, though you can’t guarantee it’s all recoverable and it costs a lot more time and money than if it hadn’t been deleted. The same message was in the lead story on NBC Nightly News, so this has hit the big-time.
Acknowledging these facts doesn’t change the equation about whether anyone who “deleted” E-mail should or should not get the benefit of the doubt about why that was done, of course.
—Matt
Peeling the onion
While the latest data dump is far from completely mined, and the story is creeping slowly out from under its big rock into the Bigtime News range, some newsies are not up to speed on noting timelines. For one, knowledge of naughtiness in KR’s mail usage/retentions dates back to early in the Fitzgerald/Plame investigation; for two, the range of scandals involved is wider than the US Attorneys one cited. As the TPM piece shows Plamegate is involved, as well as anything Abramoff related, and goddess alone knows what else.
That said, it may be time to start moving the discussion to the next step. What are the odds that the things we’ve been assuming were The Big Deal in this case (jacking the Justice
system, graft/loot/corruption/Abramoff) is itself another layer of cover, another wave of the Rovian Red Cape? “Look! Over here! Missing emails! Must be something Really Big here, go look!”
We know their main project is subverting the Constitution permanently. Their goal is to increase power in the Executive, and decrease/effectively eliminate power in the Legislative. Concurrent with both is the project to load the current Judiciary, and stuff the pipeline of future fasttrack nominees to same, with those of like mind. Note that all the USA prospective nominees received job applications with a box on it to indicate whether the applicant was or was not a member of the Federalist Society. This is as sure an indication as a diploma from Regent University Law School that you are “one of them” and will act to carry on the program.
Anything else? Yes this is a “conspiracy theory” (sprays troll repellent around the room, in a lovely scent of overripe lemon) but is there not more than enough documentation at this point that we are fucking well being conspired against? “We” being The People who are not at the pinnacle of wealth, whiteness and power in this country?
Ahem, [sprays Rant-Off around room now], it’s Friday Night Speculatin’ Time! What else could they be covering up? References to Area 51, Rosicrucians/Masons/Stonecutters, Kennedy assassinations, fakery in moon landings and most especially any LIHOP/MIHOP talk, will be summarily consigned to Spam Oblivion.
Other than that, lay on McDuff, and curs’t be he who first cries ’Hold! Enough!’
NPR had a classic Rovian bankshot
Originally, Rove wanted to fire 8 (or some small number) of the USAs. So, as cover, he planned to fire all of them.
Lovely… Reminds me very much of the idea of a small, sharply focussed program within the massive surveillance program (i.e., the ratfucking).
No authoritarians were tortured in the writing of this post.
Speaking of 2004...
Outgoing and Incoming Mail: Dead Letter Office
What's funny about the "bankshot" re: USA's
first attributed to Miers and now apparently shifting to Rove, is that it almost certainly would have worked.
The “serve at the pleasure of the President” thing, combined with a talking point blastfax to media outlets to lay the groundwork of the notion that USAttorneys are:
— commonly replaced at the beginning of administrations;
—the position serves as testing grounds for future advancement in either political or judicial career tracks;
— shouldn’t stay in place too long lest they come under excessive local political influence (hey, am I learning to think like Rove or what! …um, this is an alarming thought and I do not wish to entertain it any further)
—replacing everyone at once would eliminate any possible taint on the resumes of the persons replaced, since they were not being singled out for poor behavior
—later, rinse, repeat “pleasure of the president” as needed; after two days graduate to level-three shrug and employ phrase “old news, no big deal.”
It seems that their dedication to having nothing but True Believers in these slots was their undoing. They couldn’t interview enough applicants to be sure they had weeded out all non-Regent University, non-Federalist Society, non-previous Republican Convention delegates, etc., to make sure that everybody met their qualifications.
Heh.
The problem with The Evil is that they can't get good people
Nobody wants to work with these guys but thirty-something true believers from Regent [cough] “University” or some other Christianist
diploma mill.
So, it turns out that governing actually takes, like, skill, care, and experiences really helped. Christianist zeal and
cropprayer circles just aren’t enough.So, the very kind of people Rove and Bush wanted, needed, were compelled to hire turn out to be their undoing.
Irony is not dead.
And blowback is a bitch Goddess.
No authoritarians were tortured in the writing of this post.