This Washington Post story seems downright ominous when viewed in the context of the Mike Connell plane crash. (I must thank Larisa Alexandrovna for bringing it to my attention.)

The required transfer in four weeks of all of the Bush White House's electronic mail messages and documents to the National Archives has been imperiled by a combination of technical glitches, lawsuits and lagging computer forensic work...

Connell was in charge of providing the Bush administration with "cover" -- he gave the Bushies a way to hide the most sensitive emails, thereby avoiding the Presidential Records Act. In other words, we may never see an electronic trail giving us inside look at how the administration acted during Plame-gate, the run-up to invasion, the escape of Bin Laden, or a host of other dirty dealings.

...the administration began trying only in recent months to recover from White House backup tapes hundreds of thousands of e-mails that were reported missing from readily accessible files in 2005.

Speaking of the missing e-mails, Archives' general counsel Gary M. Stern said in an interview last week that "we hope and expect they all will exist on the system or be recoverable," even in coming weeks. "We can't say for sure."

White House spokesman Scott M. Stanzel said last week that "we are making significant progress in accounting for the e-mail records stored on our computer network." But he declined to say how many e-mails remain missing or to predict how long the recovery will take because the issue is the subject of ongoing litigation.

It seems likely to me that Connell would either possess or have knowledge of the back-ups of those emails.

The question comes to this: Would this close Bush ally have talked?

I think Alexandrovna, who met with Connell's wife, provided an important clue to the man's personality. If I may repeat those words...

The Connells really believed that what they were involved in served God's plan. Regardless of of what any of us think about their religious views or allegations relating to Connell's involvement in various things, I do think these were good people who got caught up in something bigger than themselves.

It is important to keep in mind that the Connells were right-wing Catholics. Don't lump them in with the fundamentalist Protestants who still support W. We're talking about a very different animal.

I must be frank about my prejudices: I think Southern Baptists will tell any lie if doing so furthers their theocratic goals. Baptists are hucksters. To them, reality is what they want it to be, not what is. But Catholics -- even the over-the-top reactionary Catholics who keep bottles of Lourdes water on the shelf -- do have a breaking point. Yes, they will rationalize. Yes, they will lie to themselves. But when they finally, finally realize that they are also lying to others, conscience will kick in. You cannot escape Mother Mary; you can't fool her.

Yeah, I think Connell was going to talk.