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Posted on Thursday 10 January 2008

It’s a rainy day in Georgia. "Much needed" as they say. Such days are for reading English Gothic Novels and catching up on things. Here’s one. Judge Facciola ordered the White House to answer these questions about the missing emails:
With that understanding, the court will order the defendants to provide answers to the following questions:
  1. Are the back-ups catalogued, labeled or otherwise identified to indicate the period of time they cover?
  2. Are the back-ups catalogued, labeled or otherwise identified to indicate the data contained therein?
  3. Do the back-ups contain emails written and received between 2003-2005?
  4. Do the back-ups contain the emails said to be missing that are the subject of this lawsuit?
The answers are due in three days. emptywheel speculates on what those answers will be/mean. My speculations are different. The White House isn’t going to answer those questions. They’re going to stall. Those emails, if they exist, are analogous to the Nixon Tapes. Either they exist and are going to be carefully guarded, or they were destroyed [more than any 18 minutes]. I suspect the answer is b. They were destroyed. They know what a hit they took with the DOJ email dump in the U.S. Attorney firing. They’re not going to risk that again.

So, the question becomes, "What can we do about it?" Frankly, I think the email issue is not ancillary to the various cases that have subpoenaed them. The fact that the emails are missing is a case unto itself. The Presidential records laws have been broken. The issue is enforcement. It seems to me that the burden of proof falls on the White House. If their claim is that it was "accidental," they have to prove that it was "accidental." We have, as I am obsessed with saying, no Supreme Court back-up here. The proper format is for the White House to be charged with destroying Presidential records and taken to court. Whatever happens in that courtroom will have to stand on its own, because the higher courts won’t uphold it. But if the truth is known, there are solid grounds for Impeachment.

I think those emails were deliberately destroyed. With access, that can be proven… 

  1.  
    joyhollywood
    January 10, 2008 | 4:21 PM
     

    If someone told me that the president and vice president of the United States could do anything that they want that was illegal and against the constitution 8 years ago, I would have said that they crazy. Now we have such a president and vice president and they have stacked the dept of justice and the supreme court and mindless republican congressmen with people who will let them get away with whatever lying, illegal things they want. I can only say that I hope there will never be another evil and dangerous pair of executives in the white house again. I want them to pay for their crime. If there is an afterlife, I hope Bush and Cheney stay at the inn with Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Milosevic and anyone else who has destroyed so many lives.

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