A little something to tide you all over. Because I know you are suffering withdrawal symptoms from a lack of malicious BS from your government. Hot off the press at the Washington Post:
The White House is missing as many as 225 days of e-mail dating back to 2003 and there is little if any likelihood a recovery effort will be completed by the time the Bush administration leaves office, according to an internal White House draft document obtained by The Associated Press.
The nine-page outline of the White House’s e-mail problems invites companies to bid on a project to recover the missing electronic messages.
The work would be carried out through April 19, 2009, according to the Office of Administration request for contractors’ proposals, which was dated June 20.
…
The draft document outlines a process in which private contractors would attempt to retrieve lost e-mail from 35,000 disaster recovery backup tapes dating back to October 2003, a period covering such events as growing violence in Iraq, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the criminal probe into the disclosure that Valerie Plame had worked for the CIA.The recovery project would not use backup tapes going back to March 2003, according to the draft document, even though an earlier White House assessment suggested e-mails were missing from that period as well.
Industry experts point out that relying on the backup system to ensure accurate retention, preservation and retrieval of all e-mails is problematic because it does not take into account deleted e-mails.
This is truly shocking. Really, who could have predicted such mendacious obstructionistic crap from the Bush/Cheney Administration? If the DC District Court can hold Toni Locy in contempt, I wonder if perhaps they can find some maximum hurt contempt provisions for a few of the White House Mafiosi too?
Paging MadDog. Mr. MadDog to the EW courtesy desk please. We have red meat for you. I am working on something already and, quite frankly, you folks kill me on the email dissection anyway. So, I respectfully request that the finest collective in all of the blogosphere sharpen their scalpels and see where we stand on this case. And feel free to discuss anything else too, I will be back shortly.
ADDENDUM: A couple of very cogent points from Earl of Huntington from the comments in the prior thread:
What are the accomplishments of the stellar WH telecoms team, assembled over the past several years? Its purported goals included solving this and other problems in the publicly acknowledged White House telecoms system they’ve built and operated. Although let’s not forget the additional telecoms systems the WH did or does use that they do not publicly acknowledge, eg, the mysterious, multi-faceted RNC system.
I hope that Sen. Obama’s has already assembled a dedicated team to design and implement a whole new WH telecoms system. Because whatever Bush’s IT-political gurus leave behind manifestly won’t work as described and will be loaded with back door keys and bugs. Without it, Obama’s team will have their hamstrings and Achilles tendons slashed before getting into the starting blocks. They will also be in violation of the PRO from day one.
The cost of a competent new WH telecoms system will be considerable, I would guess at least $100 million, which the Democrats should clearly label as another legacy of George W. Bush.