Plame Investigation and Missing Emails: Analysis on Emails

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emptywheel
This is the post I promised, in which I'll analyze what the timeline of the missing dates shows. My conclusion? That almost all of the days for which OVP and WH have no emails happened during periods in which they were responding to significant Plame subpoenas.

Missing Emails: Addington's Search Terms

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emptywheel
Among the documents introduced at the trial was a draft version of the search that David Addington requested Keith Roberts of the Office of Administration to do on the emails on the OVP server. This is not a final version--it is what Addington sent to Agent Roos to get his approval before he submitted it to Roberts to do his search.
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emptywheel's Famous Football Trash Talk Thread* - Championship Sunday Edition

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emptywheel
Championship Sunday brings conflicting emotions for me. It brings the very essence, the finest, that pro football has to offer; the two best teams in each conference duking it out for the right to go to the Super Bowl. It also means that, save for the commonly anti-climatic Super Bowl, the football season is over, and that leaves a hole in the sports, and emptywheel, world until next fall. Well, enough of that, we DO have one outstanding day of gridiron glory left, lets get to it.

Henry's Dates: Two Data Points from the Plame Investigation

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emptywheel
I promised I will consider the significance of the dates of missing email archives wrt the Plame investigation. But first of all, I wanted to look at two data points to establish what these dates offer us.

Henry's Dates: Medicare Part D

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emptywheel
One of the reasons it was so unwise for Tony Fratto to open his big fat mouth today regarding the White House habit of losing emails is because it offered Waxman an excuse to make previously unreleased information--the dates for which White House email archives don't exist--publicly available. That allows us to discover neat coincidences, such as that all of OMB's emails disappeared for the period leading up to Bush's signing of the Medicare Part D bill.

Tony Fratto Opens His Big Fat Mouth--and Waxman Responds

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emptywheel
When I read Tony Fratto's aggressive denials that the White House had lost millions of emails today I said to myself, "Tony, you just got the White House in a big heap of trouble with your big fat mouth." After all, I reasoned to myself, the White House has previously represented to people, including Patrick Fitzgerald, that they had lost email. That's how they kept Jenny Mayfield and Cathie Martin out of jail for not turning over what appears to be email responsive to subpoena. So if you now say that there are no emails missing, it means all that legal testimony the White House has given--some of it under oath--is incorrect. If you say that, Tony, you're just inviting someone to respond. And respond Henry Waxman did.

GAO to White House: We Hate to Say We Told You So, But We Told You So

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emptywheel
The NYT had a story yesterday reporting that the Iraqis just can't seem to spend its aide money as quickly as it's supposed to be spending it.What the NYT doesn't say, though, is that the GAO itself also reported on how much money Iraq had spent, in its report issued just before Petraeus' dog and pony show. In fact, the benchmark of whether Iraq was spending its money as quickly it was supposed to was one of the ones on which the GAO and the Administration disagreed. Whereas the GAO declared that Iraq had "partially met" its goal to spend $10 billion on reconstruction, the Administration declared Iraq's progress "satisfactory."
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Judge Hellerstein Calls the CIA on its BS

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emptywheel
Wow. Judge Hellerstein is not amused with the CIA's assertion that the torture tapes--which IG staffers flew to Thailand to view as part of their investigation into CIA interrogation methods--were not part of their investigation. Nor does he buy the assertion that the "special review" is not an investigation. He basically called Bull on the CIA's assertions in about six different ways.
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Disappearing White House Emails Timeline

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emptywheel
Jeff kicked my arse on a timing related issue yesterday, so I thought I better lay out the disappearing White House email timing all nice and neat like. I'll move this over into a permanent timeline after you guys tell me what I'm missing (Jeff, I'm looking at you). July 11, 2003:
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"It Smells Like a Cover-Up"

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emptywheel
The most interesting tidbit from John Rizzo's appearance before HPSCI yesterday is that Rizzo reported lawyers within CIA admitting the 9/11 Commission would probably want to see the torture tapes. If lawyers within CIA recognized the Commission wanted the tapes, then surely George Tenet did. But he declined to mention the tapes to the Commission. No wonder he lawyered up recently.
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Shorter Rizzo to Rodriguez: Well, If You're Not Going to Testify, I Will Screw You

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emptywheel
Jose Rodriguez, with help from Bob Bennett, tried to exonerate himself in the WaPo today. But John Rizzo, whom Rodriguez seems prepared to claim authorized the destruction, apparently had none of it during his testimony before HPSCI today.
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Off the Record on Filipino Monkey

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emptywheel
The Pentagon says they never claimed Iran was responsible for the Filipino Monkey transmission. We now know they were. So why aren't the Traditional Media reporters who know that revealing that to the American people?
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Stephen Cambone Collects on His Handiwork with CIFA

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emptywheel
I've long suspected that the GOP has used the Counter-Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA) as a way to spy on domestic enemies even while making their friends rich. CIFA is the organization that collected information on both Jesus' General and Quakers, then stuck it into a database without requisite privacy protections. And then, when Congress and the Carol Lam started focusing on CIFA, its database on private citizens got quickly disappeared.
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The Dubious Timeline from Pincus' Love Letter to Bob Bennett

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emptywheel
I've already ranted about how irresponsible it was for Walter Pincus and Joby Warrick to publish Bob Bennett's statement on behalf of Jose Rodriguez on the same day that John Rizzo testifies before Congress. Nothing like assisting the obstruction of an ongoing investigation. But now that I've done my ranting (and enjoyed the sun), here is the dubious timeline offered in Pincus and Warrick's article.
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The White House Response on Backup Tapes

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emptywheel
The CIO of the White House Office of Administration pulls of a masterful feat: she claims that the White House should have all emails on its backup tapes, even while she's admitting that it may well be missing the emails from March 2003 to October 2003.
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A Cheap Ploy to Avoid Giving Testimony, Jose Rodriguez

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emptywheel
Today's article from Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus answers a lot of questions we've been asking about the torture tapes--the biggest being that the tapes were stored and destroyed in Thailand. And it has a lot of interesting details. But its evident, overriding purpose, is to allow Jose Rodriguez and John Rizzo to coordinate stories before the latter testifies before Congress today.

You Know It's a Clusterfuck if emptywheel Agrees with PowerLine

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emptywheel
PowerLine is offended that John McCain allowed Joe Lieberman to make robocalls for him. Well, so am I. Funny how these primaries can sow agreement from both sides of the aisle?

Clusterfuck Vote #279

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emptywheel
My precinct in the People's Republic of Ann Arbor is crazily Democratic--almost 80% Dem performance. When I went to vote at around 3:45, I was around the 279th person to vote, counting absentee ballots. And from the looks of things, about two thirds of those people cast a vote in the Democratic primary.
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