(January 22, 2008) The Emails that Dick Cheney Deleted

[kristopher]

The Emails that Dick Cheney Deleted
By Scott Horton January 22, 2008, 8:26 am

Late last week, right after official White House spokesmen made a series of either evasive or completely false statements about the mysterious case of the vanishing, then reappearing, then perhaps no really vanished White House emails, Henry Waxman and his Oversight Committee announced some of the conclusions they had reached. Dan Eggen and Elizabeth Williamson published an account of it on Friday in the Washington Post:

The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional Democrat.
The 2005 study — whose credibility the White House attacked this week — identified 473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices, said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

Waxman said he decided to release the summary after White House spokesman Tony Fratto said yesterday that there is “no evidence” that any White House e-mails from those years are missing. Fratto’s assertion “seems to be an unsubstantiated statement that has no relation to the facts they have shared with us,” Waxman said. The competing claims were the latest salvos in an escalating dispute over whether the Bush administration has complied with long-standing statutory requirements to preserve official White House records — including those reflecting potentially sensitive policy discussions — for history and in case of any future legal demands.

Waxman said he is seeking testimony on the issue at a hearing next month from White House counsel Fred F. Fielding, National Archivist Allen Weinstein and Alan R. Swendiman, the politically appointed director of the Office of Administration, which produced the 2005 study at issue.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has now posted a series of studies to help us zero in on just what’s missing. It will come as no surprise to most that the big offender is the man at the center of the most virulent scandals, and the missing email traffic relates just to those dates in which a federal prosecutor would have the most interest. Vice President Dick Cheney’s office destroyed its emails, in violation of the requirements of the federal records act and potentially criminal law, for the following days....

http://harpers.org/blog/2008/01/the-emails-that-dick-cheney-deleted/

[Old and In the Way]

1. Thanks for posting this.

Just business as usual with the Gop.com folks. But not having transparency when Democrats are in office, well this is outrageous. If I thought more than half of the bernie fanclub cared about this, I would be shocked. This will settle to the bottom of DU without a comment....

[pnwmom]

4. Hillary is supporting transparency. The whole reason the emails are being looked at now is because

Hillary asked for them all to be released to the public. And in checking them over first, some bureaucrats are considering retroactive classification -- in other words, should documents that weren't classified at the time become classified now.

[kristopher]

6. Actually that isn't entirely accurate

It is true as far as it goes, but as was her right under the law, she was allowed to remove emails that she deemed 'personal'. There is no evidence of the type associated with the acts by Cheney/Rove that she abused that right.

Also, as far as classification goes, it isn't unusual for one agency to classify a document that another agency also has on file as unclassified. Disseminating the information about the act of classification is slipshod at best. I used to receive reams of classified communications and it would tickle me to get something like say, a highly classified report on some sort of activity in Teheran at the same time I'd be watching an almost identical report being broadcast by CNN. That was during the Iran Hostage "Crisis" BTW.

[pnwmom]

7. True, like everyone else she was allowed to distinguish between personal emails

and government emails.

And the whole system of classification is, as Tom Blanton, the Executive Director of the National Security Archives says, "arbitrary" and "capricious."

[Mnemosyne]

2. I remember the war criminal, Dick Cheney, having a huge shredder rental outside of his house.

There were photos of it here.

Jimmy Carter gets cancer and this evil greedy fuck goes on and on and on. If life were fair...

[silvershadow]

3. Was this before or after the raging fire in his warehouse? nt

[chknltl]

5. Gee, why was there no outrage, why no calls for investigations? Why no Impeachment Hearings!

Please note the deliberate lack of a question mark at the end of third question. To any fellow DUers who wish to re-inform me that we didn't have the votes or that it would have cost us in the next election: Tell it to the survivors over in the Middle East, the dead no longer care.

If anybody needed their e-mails looked at it would have been the BFEE's. They are the ones who lied us into a war.