Remember the supposedly missing "w's" from White House keyboards, purportedly removed by bitter departing Clinton staffers when Bush moved in 8 years ago? (Ever actually try to remove keys from a modern computer keyboard - not so easy or permanently disabling as with the old manual typewriters Rove must have had in mind back when he made up that story.)
Well now the Bush-Cheney Cabal is involved in some much more important and
tengible White House items that really have gone missing.
How about hundreds of thousands of missing email documents, the Grand Canyon Document Lacunae Bush-Cheney is trying to make away with now?
Bush e-mails may be secret a bit longer
Legal battles, technical difficulties delay required transfer to archives
By R. Jeffrey Smith updated 2:36 a.m. ET, Sun., Dec. 21, 2008
"A bit longer," indeed - more like forever, maybe.
There likely would well be plenty of "technical difficulties" in the electronic task of trying to recover the texts of hundreds of thousands of potentially dodgy emails which the Bush-Cheney Cabal likely tried its level best to erase - especially difficult to retrieve when it's Team GWB itself that's supposedly trying hard to recover them. What a surprise that they just can't seem to find them somehow, no matter how hard they try!
The required transfer in four weeks of all of the Bush White House's electronic mail messages and documents to the National Archives has been imperiled by a combination of technical glitches, lawsuits and lagging computer forensic work, according to government officials, historians and lawyers.
Federal law requires outgoing White House officials to provide the Archives copies of their records, a cache estimated at more than 300 million messages and 25,000 boxes of documents depicting some of the most sensitive policymaking of the past eight years.
But archivists are uncertain whether the transfer will include all the electronic messages sent and received by the officials, because the administration began trying only in recent months to recover from White House backup tapes hundreds of thousands of e-mails that were reported missing from readily accessible files in 2005.
These were "readily accessible files," files where you can readily see that a lot of stuff is somehow missing from them. But who knows how many more entire files just totally disappeared, and are no longer "readily accessible" at all?
The risks that the transfer may be incomplete are also pointed up by a continuing legal battle between a coalition of historians and nonprofit groups over access to Vice President Cheney's records. The coalition is contesting the administration's assertion in federal court this month that he (Cheney)"alone may determine what constitutes vice presidential records or personal records" and "how his records will be created, maintained, managed, and disposed," without outside challenge or judicial review.
(...)
The National Security Archive, a historical research group, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Government, a nonprofit watchdog organization, filed lawsuits in September 2007 to compel the White House to preserve backup e-mail tapes. In November 2007, U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. ordered White House officials to preserve such tapes and "not transfer said media out of their custody or control without leave of this court."
But wait, there's more. Cheney seems once again to be trying to hide the truth and cover his tracks, by sheer brazen denial in the face of the facts - the same strategy he used a couple of years back, when he shot that guy, and again in an interview just a few days ago. There's a sort of
Royal Prerogative Cheney seems to think he has to turn away questions, or even deny that there are any questions to be asked.
Cheney finds 'a loophole'
In the case of the vice president's records, the White House has promised a different federal judge that it will comply with a Nixon-era law requiring the preservation and transfer of all documents related to the vice president's official duties, but the coalition has drafted a filing for the court on Monday that accuses Cheney of subtly seeking to circumscribe the legal definition of what those official duties encompass to such a degree that he will be able to take home or destroy countless documents related to policymaking that historians want to see.
Anne Weisman, the counsel for the plaintiffs, called Cheney's assertion that only those records related to tasks specially assigned by Bush need to be preserved "a loophole . . . large enough to drive truckloads of documents through." It means, she said, that Cheney would not have to surrender documents related to legislation or "advice he gives the president on his own initiative and the influence he has over the president's decisions."
Full Article
This is one of the first things the new Attorney General's staff should give attention to next month.