By Nick Juliano , Rawstory.com, March 12, 2008

12 Mar 2008 // A watchdog group is asking the FBI to investigate whether any White House officials obstructed justice in deleting internal e-mails relating to the outing of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson.

The Justice Department ordered the Bush administration to preserve any records relating to the exposure of the covert agent's identity, but e-mails are missing from the very day that order was delivered and other key points surrounding Plame's outing. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a plaintiff in an ongoing lawsuit brought against the White House regarding the e-mails, on Wednesday requested that FBI Director Robert Mueller open an investigation.

"The unexplained disappearance of an entire weeks' worth of emails from the OVP [Office of the Vice President] at a time when the Department of Justice was investigating the actions of top White House officials, including officials within the OVP, warrants the initiation of a criminal investigation to determine whether White House officials obstructed justice and violated other criminal statutes," CREW's cheif counsel Anne Weismann wrote in a letter to Mueller (.pdf). "Similarly, the disappearance of over 10 million White House email records also justifies an investigation into the facts surrounding the knowing failure of the White House to comply with federal record-keeping laws."

The letter to Mueller comes after Attorney General Michael Mukasey dismissed a previous CREW request to appoint a special counsel to investigate the missing e-mails.

On Sept. 30, 2003, Alberto Gonzales, who was then White House counsel, sent a letter to White House staff alerting them that the Justice Department was opening a criminal investigation into the leak of Plame's name. Conservative columnist Robert Novak had outed the CIA operative in a July 2003 column.

E-mails from Vice President Dick Cheney's office were never recovered for the week of Sept. 30 through Oct. 6, and they apparently were not preserved on a backup tape created Oct. 21, Weismann said. CREW's request is based on evidence that has emerged from its own investigations and since the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee began investigating the missing e-mails.

"It does seem that now the evidentiary record is out there now, it's more specific. ... Sometime between Sept. 30 and Oct. 21 [the e-mails] were deleted, they went missing," Weismann said in an interview with RAW STORY Wednesday.

The request for an FBI investigation comes as CREW and the National Security Archive, another open-government watchdog, are in the midst of lawsuits against the White House Office of Administration and Executive Office of the President regarding the missing e-mails.

Also on Wednesday, the Archive requested that a federal judge order an emergency deposition of Theresa Payton, the Office of Administration's chief information officer, to clear up contradictory testimony Payton gave to the court and during an Oversight Committee hearing.