2003-- Ashcroft DoJ gave WH 24hours to "clean e-mails" (Plame)

underpants

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Thu Apr-12-07 07:46 AM
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2003-- Ashcroft DoJ gave WH 24hours to "clean e-mails" (Plame)

Just so we don't forget.

It Appears that Ashcroft Gave the White House 24 Hours to "Clean Up" Their Files Before A Memo Was Sent to Save Documents: Who Will Investigate the Justice Department for Potentially Facilitating Obstruction of Justice?

http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/10/02_ashcroft.html

She stated that at the request of the White House, the DOJ deferred for 24 hours the request that all documents, email, logs be held and preserved in the investigation of the Plame outing.

NPR legal correspondent, Nina Totenberg: Well no administration ever wants an independent overseer, and there are very good career people who are in charge of this investigation, but it could get hairy. Yesterday I talked to a former justice department official who wondered to me why the White House had asked the Justice Department if they could wait a day, earlier this week, before directing the White House staff to preserve all phone and email records, and why, similarly, the Justice Department had agreed to let the White House wait that day. In the last analysis career people can't make some of the decisions that will have to be made, like whether to call a reporter before a grand jury. The Attorney General under Justice (Department) regulations is required to make that decision. A career person can't make it. And if a leaker is identified and not prosecuted it could raise problems with the CIA. Will the agency believe that a decision not to prosecute was made fairly, or will it, as one former Justice Department
official put it to me, open a chasm of distrust between the two agencies. As I said no administration likes to open itself up to outside investigators. And the temperature isn't that hot yet, despite that poll you cited at the beginning, but it could get that hot, and we just can't know right now whether the temperature will get that hot for a long time and make it impossible to continue the course that the administration now has chosen
to take.

Many major media outlets continue to ignore story of missing White House emails
Tue, Feb 7, 2006 12:33pm EST
http://mediamatters.org/items/200602070004

Last week, Media Matters for America documented how most media outlets failed to report that special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the lead prosecutor in the CIA leak case, wrote -- in a letter to defense attorneys for former vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby -- that numerous White House emails from 2003 are missing from White House computer archives. A further review by Media Matters has found that most major media outlets have continued to ignore this story; specifically, no reports on the missing emails have been found on any of the three major broadcast networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS), The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, or the Reuters wire service.