White House had daily audits of e-mails, which suggests missing e-mails were destroyed
Earlier this year, CREW broke the story that five million e-mails were missing from the White House system. We issued a report, Without A Trace, detailing the legal issues behind the story of the White House e-mail scandal. Even top Bush officials could not deny our findings. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), Chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has been investigating the missing e-mails. Yesterday, we learned that the White House conducted daily audits of its e-mail system. As CREW's Anne Weismann told Bloomberg News, that certainly suggests the e-mails weren't lost in a technical glitch:
The revelation that there were daily audits suggests that e-mails were destroyed, said Anne Weismann, general counsel of the nonprofit watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sued the Bush administration in May over the missing e-mails.
"It's hard to imagine it could have been a technical problem," Weismann said in an interview. It is "incomprehensible that e-mail could go missing and it not be caught."
Incomprehensible indeed. Congress needs to keep pursuing this issue.
August 31, 2007 By ERIC
August 31, 2007
By ERIC SCHMITT and JAMES GLANZ NYT
WASHINGTON, Aug. 30 — An American-owned company operating from Kuwait paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to American contracting officers in efforts to win more than $11 million in contracts, the government says in court documents.
The Army last month suspended the company, Lee Dynamics International, from doing business with the government, and the case now appears to be at the center of a contracting fraud scandal that prompted Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to dispatch the Pentagon inspector general to Iraq to investigate.
Court documents filed in the case say the Army took action because the company was suspected of paying hundreds of thousands in bribes to Army officers to secure contracts to build, operate and maintain warehouses in Iraq that stored weapons, uniforms, vehicles and other matériel for Iraqi forces in 2004 and 2005.
A lawyer for the company denied the accusations.
One of the officers, Maj. Gloria D. Davis, a contracting official in Kuwait, shot and killed herself in Baghdad in December 2006. Government officials say the suicide occurred a day after she admitted to an Army investigator that she had accepted at least $225,000 in bribes from the company. The United States has begun proceedings to seize Major Davis’s assets, a move her heirs are contesting.
The company has been known as American Logistics Services.
Details of the case have come to light because the company contested the Army’s decision, on July 9, to suspend it from obtaining contracts. That forced the government to disclose details in court papers, including a seven-page statement by an Army investigator.
The octopus disgorges
Sidley Austin is one of the largest and most prestigious law firms in the US, employing 1700 attorneys (per wikipedia) in offices on four continents. They were employed by the White House to advise on “document retention” issues and now are about to be embroiled in the issue of 5 million missing White House emails. This firm is no doubt the so-called “outside contractor” mentioned by sources that is said to have conducted the daily audit of those missing emails. The assumption is that those missing emails were destroyed which will be seen to be obstruction of justice. The harsh glare of the public spotlight regarding these emails will not be of benefit to Sidley Austin. They have made themselves an integral part of bushco and have bet the ranch that the Bush White House would never lose control of the Justice Department.
The issue is now much simplified: whether or not the advise of Sidley Austin to the White House functionary that dealt with those daily audits is to be considered as “executive privilege”. The WH functionary?....very likely the Office of Administration which has belatedly tried to claim this privilege in response to a CREW FOIA request.
We are at the very eye of the octopus.
Missing E-Mails
In my limited knowledge of computers...I know one thing.
E-Mails can't be destroyed by simply "deleting" them. They are housed in the Hard Drive and forensic computer experts have successfully retrieved them.
Did the White House remove and destroy ALL the Hard Drives from ALL the computers used by Rove, Cheney, Addington, Bolton, etc?
THAT is one question that MUST be asked and answered.
PatA
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Sidley Austin
According to the report, there was involved an "outside contractor" who conducted the daily audit of the email. Here the claim of executive privilege seems weaker than ever.
And who might have that "outside contractor" have been? Betcha it was a law firm which specializes in “document retention” issues, I’ll just betcha.
Sidley Austin.