I’ve been ignoring the sporadic reports of Libby’s lawyers requests for documents from Patrick Fitzgerald, sort of thinking that it was the usual pretrial jockeying, maybe a bit irritated that it’s preoccuppying Fitzgerald and keeping him away from God’s calling – nailing Karl Rove. But it’s beginning to look like there may be things to learn here. In his response to Libby’s lawyers, right near the end, we hear this:
Reddhedd at Firedoglake and Georgia10 at the DailyKOS both lit up like Christmas Trees over this, as they should. 
There was a 12 hour period when Gonzales did not issue an order about not destroying documents. Were emails destroyed in the President’s and Vice President’s office? That there are missing emails is intriguing. But equally interesting is how does Fitzgerald know about them? Does he have them? What did they say?
We don’t know about any of that yet, but it’s good to hear that Patrick Fitzgerald is still running his seismograph. There are fault lines creaking all over this terrain. Can a real life earthquake be that far away?
Any large e-mail system would use a unique identifier assigned by the system for storage and retrieval. These identifiers are assigned by the system and sequential.
If you are looking at an index of the e-mails it would be readily obvious if some were removed as there would be a break in the sequence. By looking at the date/time stamps on the e-mails before and after the break you can tell the time frame during which they were sent.
If Microsoft software were used, the individual e-mails would contain a lot more information than most people realize, including the computer used and the user id regardless of what the message header says.