No, we hadn’t forgotten about this. We just laid low to wait for some more promising game to come up the trail to the waterhole. Huntmaster Josh Marshall is doing the drive, and a fellow hunter found this in the new Department of Justice document dump very quietly released last night:

From: Jennings, Jeffee S.
Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2007 10:17 AM
To: ~KR@georgewbush,com’; Fielding, Fred F.; Sullivan, Kevin F.; Perino, Dana M.;
tkyle.sampson@usdoj.gov’
Cc: ’Sara Taylor’
Subject: NM USATTY - urgent issue
Importance: High -
I just received a telephone call from Steve Bell, Sen. Domenici’s CoS, who urgently reported the following:
1. Outgoing USATTY David 1glesias.i~h olding a press conference at 11:30 Eastern this
morning. I
2 . He is allegedly going to say that he was contacted by’ two Members of Congress last Fa11  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 

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