Category Archives: Politics: US: GW Bush Scandals

One stop shopppig for your informed Rove-Plame-email speculation: Firedoglake – The Case of Patrick Fitzgerald and the Missing Emails:

Did Fitzgerald know about the emails? I think he did, having learned about the emails from Adam Levine, though I think the 250 missing email pages came from the deleted WH emails. So does the discussion of the missing emails impact Fitzgerald's case in any way? I don't know. It seems that, at the very least, this confusion offers Waxman (or Conyers) an opportunity to renew his request to talk to Fitzgerald, at least about the limited scope of the email evidence turned over. And possibly, if Fitzgerald didn't get to do the full forensic analysis of the GWB43 servers he might have liked to do in December 2005, this would offer a great opportunity to do so. After all, Fred Fielding can't very well claim executive privilege prevents Fitzgerald from investigating the RNC servers, since BushCo has already turned over the crown jewels, the morning Vice Presidential Daily Briefings, so as to appear to be cooperating with Fitzgerald's investigation. So by having Fitzgerald seize the RNC servers, rather than Waxman do it, you do it under the aegis of an ongoing criminal investigation.

Kevin Drum points to a fascinating update on the email trail at The Washington Monthly,

MISSING EMAILS UPDATE….Remember all those missing emails the White House told us about yesterday? Turns out the RNC does have copies on its servers. Whew. Apparently, back in 2004, as part of the Valerie Plame investigation, Patrick Fitzgerald told them to stop deleting emails.

So they did. Except, it turns out, for Karl Rove's emails, many of which are still missing. Now that's just plain peculiar, isn't it?

Fuller story at TMP Muckraker. It's really worth reading.

Update: And this canny comment from Josh Marshall,

I can say that I am very confident, 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 continuing destroying them, even after all of this had happened.

CREW says,

Through two confidential sources, CREW learned that the Executive Office of the President (EOP) has lost over FIVE MILLION emails generated between March 2003 and October 2005. The White House counsel's office was advised of these problems in 2005 and CREW has been told that the White House was given a plan of action to recover these emails, but to date nothing has been done to rectify this significant loss of records.

Full report on the legal background online too.

5,000,000 in 30 months. That's 166,666/month. Or about 5,500 per day. How many people is that?

Update: Some relevant data on that question.

SO, those RNC emails that Karl Rove et all were sending each other about official business while staying off the radar of the official archives…. It seems that a bunch of them were accidentally deleted.

The White House said Wednesday it had mishandled Republican Party-sponsored e-mail accounts used by nearly two dozen presidential aides, resulting in the loss of an undetermined number of e-mails concerning official White House business.

…

[WH spokesman Scott] Stanzel said he could not speak to whether anyone was intentionally trying to avoid White House archiving because he had not spoken to all those involved.

Stanzel said some e-mails have been lost because the White House lacked clear policies on complying with Presidential Records Act requirements.

Before 2004, for instance, e-mails to and from the accounts were typically automatically deleted every 30 days along with all other RNC e-mails. Even though that was changed in 2004, so that the White House staffers with those accounts were excluded from the RNC's automatic deletion policy, some of their e-mails were lost anyway when individual aides deleted their own files, Stanzel said.

He could not say what had been lost, and said the White House is working to recover as many as they can. The White House has now shut off employees' ability to delete e-mails on the separate accounts, and is briefing staffers on how to better make determinations about when — and when not — to use them, Stanzel said.

Watergate anyone?

History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

I take it this is the first time?

The Gonzales 8 scandal has two sides: the improper firings and the improper hirings. So far, most of the heat and light has been on the firings. That may change in light of what we are learning about the people parachuted in to US Attorney jobs without Senate confirmation — and about the people retained.

There have been reports that Little Rock’s interim U.S. Attorney J. Timothy Griffin may have seriously exaggerated his prosecutorial experience,

The 38-year-old Griffin claims on his official Web site that he prosecuted 40 criminal cases while at Ft. Campbell, where he was stationed from September 2005 to May 2006. But Army authorities say Ft. Campbell’s records show Griffin only serving as assistant trial counsel on three cases, none of which went to trial.

Griffin didn’t agree to be interviewed about his claim of 40 criminal prosecutions versus the Army’s confirmation of three cases, all of which were settled as plea bargains. But Cherith Beck, a Griffin spokeswoman, suggested that Griffin’s higher number might refer to all cases he worked on in any capacity.

“Just wanted to clarify, make sure you had an understanding that prosecuted means it’s a case he handled while he was there; it doesn’t mean that it went to trial necessarily,” Beck said. “Prosecuted means he handled those cases in one form or another.”

Sorry, but few if any lawyers would equate touching the case file with the claim that someone “prosecuted” a case.

[updated] And now we learn this about the interim recently-confirmed, leading to a controversial swearing-in US Attorney in Minneapolis, via Firedoglake (collecting sources from around the net),

four top assistants to U.S. Attorney Rachel Paulose have stepped down from their [administrative] positions.

…. First Assistant Attorney John Marti, Criminal Division Chief Jim Lakner, Civil Division Chief Erika Monzangue, and Administrative Officer Tim Anderson all left their posts Thursday.

Political insiders have criticized Paulose's rise to the U.S. Attorney's position as a political favor to the Bush Administration. She is just 34-years old and has worked directly for the same justice department officials who are currently under fire as part of the national U.S. Attorney's office scandal.

…

Paulose was a special assistant to Alberto Gonzales and apparently big buds with none other than 5th amendment invoker Monica Goodling.

Meanwhile, Gonzales is stonewalling on the release of the less sanitized documents.

This week also saw the very rare, even stunning, action by the 7th circuit ruling from the bench to free a defendant from what many claim was fallout from a political prosecution against a prominent Democrat based on very scant evidence. Rather than try to quote you all the details, read about it at Figure in Travelgate ordered released by end of business today: Fed Appeals Court Unimpressed by Biskupic's Politically Motivated Prosecution. Note that the US Attorney in this case, Steven M. Biskupic, was not. as far as we know, on the DOJ/Rove short list for removal — a “loyal Bushie” perhaps?

This piece of poetic justice regarding the Justice Department's difficulties caused by attempts to come up with something to justify the firing of a US Attorney deserves to appear on Google as a definition of the phrase Hoist by their own petard.