Very seldom can this be said, but it looks to me like ThinkProgress got so excited by a story that they didn’t (yet) absorb the other, really explosive, story inside it. Check this out:

Justice Department documents released tonight include new emails linking Karl Rove’s top aides — former White House political director Sara Taylor, who resigned last month, and her deputy Scott Jennings — to the U.S. attorney scandal. Subpoenas have been authorized, but not approved, for both Taylor and Jennings.

Significant, sure. Illegal as shit, well, duh! This goes without saying for this crew. But way down the story this sorta leaps out:

The messages from Taylor and Jennings to the Justice officials are sent from their Republican National Committee email accounts.

Now can we get those subpoenas to Chattanooga Rep. Waxman? There is no longer any way anybody can claim that “those RNChq.com and gwb43.com and other Smartech emails were just used for political matters.” These mails were entirely about government business, to wit the US Attorney positions. They should have gone through the legal, mandatory, US Archivist-recorded .gov email system. They did not. Case fucking closed already, dammit.  Read more 

Froomkin, of all people, may have (I’m gonna say inadvertently) buried a lede in his Wednesday column. Quoting an AP piece on the subject of Susan Ralston’s Dance of the Seven Veils of Immunity, there is the line

Waxman’s memo is worth a read. As Waxman notes: “In September 2006, Chairman Davis and Ranking Member Waxman released a staff report summarizing what the Committee had learned from a review of billing records and e-mails provided to the Committee by Mr. Abramoff’s former lobbying firm, Greenberg Traurig.

Ralston, of course, was Abramoff’s former top aide who he conveeeeeniently handed off to the Dark Lord when one K. Rove needed a top aide when they completed their hijacking of the US executive branch. Think of Ralston as the hijacker who guarded the cockpit door against passengers trying to bang it open with the food cart.

But what makes this particular story jump out at me is that a few weeks ago Lambert ran across a record of some Abramoff-related emails as we were digging into the [ILLEGAL] private communications net we’ve been calling “gwb43.com” run for the Republican National Committee [RNC.com] by Smartech Corp out of Chattanooga TN. [with backup storage at Coptix.com also of C’noogie—wouldn’t want Jeffy to think we’d forgotten him!]

In the header was an Abramoff message—I forget who it was to, might have been Ralston herself—and the return address caught my eye for having the letters “gt” in it.  Read more 

Oh, Monica, Monica, Monica. I shake my head in sorrow. You should have skipped Regent and the law degree and gone someplace where they taught history. Recent American history for example. Like the Watergate story.

You, dear reader, or I may delete a hundred emails a day. Employees of the Justice Department operate under somewhat different rules. So when one Monica wrote (we don’t know at this point if it was on her .gov email or that nasty gwb43.com one) looked suspicious to several people scanning the Friday Document Dump, including our own scarshapedstar, it was because he noted her use of the word “friendlies.” Now it turns out there were other words of interest in this same mail as well.

These were found, and Monica got busted, by a party with the excellent name of Anonymous Liberal, who happens to be a lawyer too. She/he makes clear just why Monica is now well and truly screwed, blued and tattooed: the words, in bold even, on her email of Feb. 12 2007, Please delete prior versions.  Read more 

Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s Friday night and you aint’ got nobody, you got some money cuz you just got paid, how you wish you had someone to talk to, you’re in an awful way…oh waitaminit, that’s Saturday night. Never mind.*

New DoJ Docco Dump over at Josh’s Place. Should you be sufficiently bored, determined to restore Constitutional government, or out of beer, give it a look-through and help them compile Things That Need To Be Noted.

It’s a PDF file as usual just to make it more of a pain in the ass so you won’t look at it. Are you gonna fall for that cheesy a tactic? I didn’t think so.  Read more 

Our magic word for today is “imaged.” For some reason that made me think of the old Star Trek ep where they transport into the Bizarro Universe and meet the Spock with the Beard and Uhura is dressed even hotter than usual, complete with dagger in a leg holster. From, as usual, Your Daily Froom:

In a letter to the House oversight committee, the Republican National Committee turned over a heavily caveated list with 37 names on it. It was described as a “current list of users who we believe are or were White House employees using RNC accounts for whom we have been able to identify active e-mail data on operational RNC servers.” The RNC said more names may well show up later.

The RNC says it is “working diligently to identify and preserve all potentially relevant data that may exist” and has already gathered 25.5 million kilobytes of e-mail from the 37. It has also hired a computer forensics firm that has “imaged” several RNC computers and blackberries that are currently being used by White House employees.

The Associated Press has an annotated version of the list. The most prominent name on it, other than Karl Rove of course: Presidential counselor Dan Bartlett.

Are there any contests currently running for “greatest number of weasle words that can be squeezed into one sentence”? If so I have a nominee.  Read more 

From the invaluable ThinkProgress today, the latest “offer” from the RNC as to just how much Congressional oversight they will ever so graciously allow Rep. Waxman to perform:

In a new letter to the Republican National Committee, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman writes that the RNC has provided only minimal information regarding White House officials’ use of RNC e-mail accounts. The purpose of Waxman’s inquiry was in part to determine the extent that White House staff used “non-governmental e-mail accounts to conduct official government business.”

In the new letter, Waxman reveals that the RNC’s response thus far has been to propose that any Congressional requests for emails be filtered through “eight search terms, such as ‘political briefing,’ ‘Hatch Act,’ and ‘2008.’”

Is this cute or what? You think the FBI would have caught Al Capone if they were only allowed to use evidence of him speaking or writing the words “bootlegging” and “criminal conspiracy” and “tax evasion”? Set phasers on “hit ’em with the chair,” Henry.

And just to do our part I think we, all of us here—that means you too readers!— should come up with our own list of “eight search terms” that would be most productive in this search.  Read more 

Well, I have un-stickied yesterdays “gwb43.com: Fri. 13th Edition” on account of it was not only getting exceedingly long but that, well, it isn’t Friday the 13th any more.

So use this post as a depository for data droppings, either links to newer statements, comments from other blogs or news sites, or personal thoughts on Our Story So Far. This has been a shock’n’awe couple of days as far as volume of information coming out as this story starts to hit the national media. (Except for Fox, which rumor has it is not covering the story at all. Heh.)

We need to pull back and look at the larger picture.  Read more 

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.  Read more