The White House said Wednesday it had mishandled Republican Party-sponsored e-mail accounts used by nearly two dozen presidential aides, resulting in the loss of an undetermined number of e-mails concerning official White House business.We knew it would happen. And now it has happened. The Oops story has already evinced hundreds of comments on Kos, some of which are quite amusing and incisive. My own reaction to the Oops excuse can be reduced to one word:
BULLSHIT!
But hey -- why stop with computergate? Why not try to Oops your way out of responsibility for the war?
Niger forgeries -- the "Oops" excuse: On another site, I offer my response to the rather simplistic ABC News story that a little Googling could have exposed the Niger forgeries and avoided war. My piece is long and yet not nearly long enough, since it tries to summarize in a short space the work of Larisa Alexandrovna, Peter Eisner, and La Repubblica.
An impossible task, that. Woody Allen once offered a three-word precis of War and Peace: "It's about Russia." If only Niger-gate were that easy...
Added note: Kos now features a name-the-scandal contest for GWB43 addicts. My entry, "computergate," has a mere three votes at this writing. The leader is "e-gate" (ho-hum) at ten votes and "Secret Servers" at nine. I think "Secret Servers" is really funny, but I just can't see it making the newscasts, and people will mis-hear it as "Secret Service." Vote for computergate!
6 comments:
I was going to vote for Hide-the-Salami-gate, but they don't have it!
If Congress had REAL oversight of the executive branch, their police agency would obtain search warrants, and seize the entire computer system of the Republican party. At the very least, there is another crime here, in violating the records act, and probably more.
As for names, maybe fornigate? We are certainly the ones getting the shaft.
Servergate.
A commenter on TheNextHurrah suggested DogAte; clever.
Helo- (or Ehlo-)Gate (helo and ehlo are standard greetings when mail servers "introduce" themselves to the next hop)?
Finally, the big media is covering this article and giving some coverage:
Associated Press article:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/04/12/national/w085025D26.DTL&hw=missing+email&sn=001&sc=1000
(this was buried towards the back of the front section of today's SF Chronicle)
Leahy Says Bush Aides Lied About E-Mails
04-12) 08:58 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) --
President Bush's aides are lying about White House e-mails sent on a Republican account that might have been lost, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said Thursday, vowing to subpoena those documents if the administration fails to cough them up.
"They say they have not been preserved. I don't believe that!" Leahy shouted from the Senate floor.
"You can't erase e-mails, not today. They've gone through too many servers," said Leahy, D-Vt. "Those e-mails are there, they just don't want to produce them. We'll subpoena them if necessary."
White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said there is no effort to purposely keep the e-mails under wraps, and that the counsel's office is doing everything it can to recover any that were lost.
"The purpose of our review is to make every reasonable effort to recover potentially lost e-mails, and that is why we've been in contact with forensic experts," he said.
Look at all these articles published in the late two days!
WSJ, WaPost, ABC News, etc.
Lost in the (e-)Mail: White House Admits Mishandling Staff E-mails
ABC News - 6 hours ago
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales speaks during a news conference at the Justice Department in Washington, Tuesday, March 13, 2007. ...
White House: "We Live in a New Time"
TPMmuckraker, NY - 1 hour ago
By Paul Kiel - April 12, 2007, 12:43 PM. Highlights from this morning's White House press gaggle, during which spokesman Scott Stanzel did his best to ...
Updated: White House admits emails were deleted
ComputerworldUK, UK - 1 hour ago
By Tash Shifrin. Officials for US president George Bush have admitted that an unknown number of emails at the centre of a political row over the firing of ...
Congress Probes Private White House E-mail
NewsMax.com, FL - Apr 10, 2007
White House Deputy Political Director Scott Jennings used a private e-mail account, instead of an official government one, to communicate about the firings ...
White House emails gone missing
Chicago Tribune, IL - 44 minutes ago
In the congressional investigation of the White House's role in the firing of several federal prosecutors last year, the Justice Department has turned over ...
Says Emails Were Erased
Wall Street Journal (subscription), NY - 13 hours ago
By a WALL STREET JOURNAL Staff Reporter. WASHINGTON -- The White House acknowledged for the first time yesterday some top staffers' emails sent through ...
Send RNC emails to Congress
Los Angeles Times, CA - Apr 11, 2007
Congress should be able to see e-mail about official business, no matter which account it was sent from. IT'S A QUESTION that, until recently, ...
The Next Bush Scandal?
Washington Post, DC - Apr 10, 2007
By Dan Froomkin. The slowly-unfolding disclosure that some White House aides use non-government e-mail servers to conduct official business may soon be ...
Congress Follows Email Trail
Wall Street Journal - Apr 9, 2007
By JOHN D. MCKINNON. WASHINGTON -- The widespread use of private email accounts by some top White House officials is sparking a congressional probe into the ...
the (e-)Mail: White House Admits Mishandling Staff E-mails
Media Channel, NY - 1 hour ago
By ABC News. To the outrage of Democrats on Capitol Hill the White House admitted today that some e-mails from White House staffers have “potentially been ...
Today's Must Read
TPMmuckraker, NY - 3 hours ago
By Paul Kiel - April 12, 2007, 10:28 AM. Yesterday, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel spent about 80 minutes yesterday trying to explain to reporters how ...
White House may have lost key e-mails
The Spokesman Review, WA - 10 hours ago
WASHINGTON – The White House said Wednesday that it might have lost what could amount to thousands of messages sent through a private e-mail system used by ...
White House "Accidentally" Loses Requested E-Mails
Seeing the Forest, CA - 12 hours ago
The background is that the law requirs the White House to preserve all official e-mails. So Rove and others instead used an e-mail server at the Republican ...
RNC claims it lost White House emails.
Think Progress, DC - 17 hours ago
“The White House said Wednesday it had mishandled Republican Party-sponsored e-mail accounts used by nearly two dozen presidential aides, resulting in the ...
Whitehouse Use of RNC Emails May Open RNC to Permitted Dem ...
OpEdNews, PA - Apr 10, 2007
by Rob Kall Page 1 of 1 page(s). The Watergate breakin was an attempt, approved at the highest levels, by the Republican party to find out what the ...
Taking the White House at their Word
Huffington Post, NY - Apr 10, 2007
This week, Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform began raising questions about the use of RNC ...
The White House Email Controversy Heats Up
Mother Jones, CA - Apr 10, 2007
The hidden scandal in the administration’s already scandalous purge of eight US Attorneys is the discovery that White House officials have been regularly ...
Congress Probes Private White House E-mail
NewsMax.com, FL - Apr 10, 2007
Deputy Political Director at the White House Scott Jennings used a private e-mail account, instead of an official government one, to communicate about the ...
Congress going after White House e-mail
GOPUSA, TX - Apr 10, 2007
By UPI Staff. WASHINGTON (UPI) -- Congressional investigators demanded access to e-mail sent from White House laptop computers provided by the Republican ...
If you are trying to recover one specific e-mail, say the one that went out
with a suspected incorrect copy of a contract, in my experience, you will utterly fail to find that one e-mail in a working copy over half the time.
If you are trying to find all thee-mails where people wish each other happy birthday and advertise free puppies, you'll find more than you need.
Anyway, the point is that the usual e-mail chain goes:
* Sender PC
* Sender server
* Receiver server
* Receiver PC
.... so there are potentially four machines on which you can find a copy.
The servers are the ones that they instituted the 30-day deletion rule on (later changed), which is reasonable IT practice unless you have stuff you're supposed to save by law as in the financial or medical industries.
In those cases you have very deliberate, ironclad, triply redundant backup procedures.
I strongly doubt that the PCs at either end had periodic deletion -- in practice, most people's Outlook folders just fill up indefinitely until they get a new PC issued.
And there's the rub, what if the Rove 'issued laptops' were built specifically to modification to use an e-mail client that does not archive data or has some
sort of Jame Bond mod built in technology;I would be certain to get a hold of a few dozen of these 'special' laptops if I were them.
they go on to say, The idea that a bunch of pols magically understood how to clean out their Outlook folders by themselves and did so regularly is a real stretch. I know that only about 1% of users I've ever encountered had a real understanding of Outlook.
I'm more interested in the blackberry/IM thing, seems they are a different platform altogether. A whole different can of worms.
further, while I have no doubt we may find some nefarious,-- even unlawful evidence--, I'm quite sure the inner, inner circle of real criminal treasonous stuff will be long gone. They can't farm this stuff out to underlings, at least not at too low a level. That much blatant illegality has been known to make the koolaid taste funny.
Finally, (when dealing w/just e-mail) these missing emails have "turned up before" under duress when a certain pasty, chubby, balding political operative made his FIFTH appearance before a Grand Jury in the Plame
Affair. http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0428nj1.htm
250-pages worth.
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Fitzgerald_discloses_White_House_recentl
y_turned_0224.html
From the VP's office. Which allowed Rove to throw Scooter under the bus.
Also, remember Gonzales was/is WH Counsel--he was/is in charge of
enforcement of retention policies, no? Wasn't he involved in that delay of documents from the Plame thing too? Delay delay, stall stall... run out the clock.
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