The comments to my diary yesterday http://www.dailykos.com/... provide a virtual "How To Recover 'Missing' E-Mail" manual for Congress. So now the RNC is telling Congress that it is missing at least four years' worth of e-mail from Karl Rove. As Saturday Night Live's Church Lady would say, "How convenient . . ."
Premeditation, willful and knowing destruction of evidence, obstruction of justice, making false statements, violating the Presidenital Records Act, and Karl Rove in a pear tree.
The comments to my diary yesterday provide a virtual "How To Recover 'Missing' E-Mail" manual for Congress. So now the RNC is telling Congress that it is missing at least four years' worth of e-mail from Karl Rove. As Santurday Night Live's Church Lady would say, "How convenient. . . ."
Republican officials (courtesy of RNC lawyer Rob Kelner) said they still hope to "find" the e-mail as they conduct forensic work on their computer equipment. Here's what needs to happen immediately:
FIRST, Republican officials should be ordered to immediately cease and desist from conducting further computer forensics on their computers. They've already acknowledged that they had to take actions specifically to prevent Rove, and Rove alone, from deleting his e-mails from the RNC server.
SECOND, get a warrant to seize Rove's computer. There's abundant probable cause that he was deliberately obstructing justice. It's a tacit admission that the RNC undertook its own Karl Purge Prevention Plan in 2005.
THIRD, obtain a warrant to search all the e-mail accounts Rove used: the one with the RNC, the one with the White House, and the one registered to his old political consulting company.
FOURTH, the Senate Judiciary Committee should subpoena the hard drives of the 22 White House officials--and a total of about 50 over the course of the Administration--who have used the political acccounts set up by the RNC. These accounts were being used specifically to conduct government business but avoid Congressional (and now media) scrutiny. As spelled out in detail yesterday, most of this material is not really "lost." As many of you pointed out, one would have to go to extraordinary lengths to destroy e-mail beyond all hope of retrieval. So if some of the sharper knives in the drawer deliberately gave their hard drives a magnet massage or rubbed down each drive platter with sand-paper, that is just as, if not more, damning than whatever their e-mails said.
FIFTH, Congress should officially order that all Justice Department, White House and RNC e-mail be preserved so that hitting the "delete" button will be a crime. The Executive Office of the President has "lost" over FIVE MILLION emails generated between March 2003 and October 2005. The RNC has "lost" countless e-mails pre-2005. Good news, guys! They're not really lost. You just don't know how to recover them.
SIXTH, Cngress should get a warrant to seize the servers from Smartech, Coptix and and Govtech, which are in the basement of the Capital Mark Bank & Trust building (formerly Pioneer Building) at 801 Broad Street in downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee.
SEVENTH, Congress needs to appoint an independent data-recovery engineer to examine the hard drives. Its the proverbial fox guarding the chicken coop to leave this task to the RNC.
P.S. Unrelated (sort of) - As a former Justice Department attorney and the wife of a World Bank employee, I find it a little getting-Al-Capone-on-tax-evasion-ish that Alberto Gonzales and Paul Woflowitz might resign, not for being the architechts of U.S. torture policy and the Iraq war, respectively, but for bureaucratic corruption. Not to minimize their latest misdeeds, but masterminding torture and war are at the top of my list of human atrocities.