Missing White House Emails Match Plame Time Frames
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report
Tuesday 22 January 2008
At 8 PM on September 29, 2003, former White House counsel Alberto
Gonzales received a phone call from the Department of Justice (DOJ).
Gonzales received formal notification that evening that the DOJ had
launched a criminal investigation into the leak of covert CIA operative
Valerie Plame Wilson.
Curiously, the Justice Department, which at the time was headed by John
Ashcroft, officially launched the investigation on September 26, 2003, but
Ashcroft waited more than three days before notifying Gonzales and the
White House, whose high-level staffers were reported to be responsible for
disseminating Wilson's affiliation with the spy agency to the media just
two-and-a-half months earlier.
Gonzales asked the DOJ if he could wait until morning before notifying
White House staffers about the probe, thereby delaying the issuance of a
directive to preserve emails and other documents related to the leak of
Wilson's undercover status federal investigators would need as part of
their investigation.
The DOJ agreed.
But after Gonzales hung up the telephone, he immediately contacted
Andrew Card, who was White House chief of staff at the time, and told him
about the investigation.
Twelve hours later, Gonzales sent out an email to more than 1,000 White
House staffers stating, "you must preserve all materials that might in any
way be related to the [Justice] department's investigation" of Wilson as
well as any emails or documents that mentioned her husband, former
Ambassador Joseph Wilson, whose criticism of the administration's prewar
Iraq intelligence led White House officials to leak his wife's identity to
the media.
What happened during those 12 hours is anyone's guess. Did Andrew Card
provide top White House officials such as Karl Rove and Vice President *****
Cheney's former Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby - the two top Bush
administration officials who were responsible for unmasking Mrs. Wilson's
covert status - advance notice of the investigation in an attempt to get
them to destroy smoking-gun evidence linking them to the leak?
Given this administration's penchant for secrecy and its track record
for being less than truthful with the public and Congress about what
administration officials knew and when they knew, it's certainly possible.
The 12-hour gap and the four days it took the Justice Department to
notify Gonzales about the probe was seen as a departure from standard
procedure, according to a letter sent to President Bush by Sens. Tom
Daschle, Chuck Schumer, Carl Levin and Joseph Biden in October 2003.
"Every former prosecutor with whom we have spoken has said that the
first step in such an investigation would be to ensure all potentially
relevant evidence is preserved, yet the Justice Department waited four days
before making a formal request for documents," the letter says. "When the
Justice Department finally asked the White House to order employees to
preserve documents, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales asked for
permission to delay transmitting the order to preserve evidence until
morning. The request for a delay was granted. Again, every former
prosecutor with whom we have spoken has said that such a delay is a
significant departure from standard practice." The implication was the
White House might have destroyed evidence before receiving official
notification to turn over documents.
This story has been told numerous times over the past four-and-a-half
years. Yet, each time the narrative is repeated, it takes on new meaning as
a result of additional information and/or evidence that has surfaced to
suggest some sort of malfeasance on the part of White House officials who
played a role in the Wilson leak.
Last week, the White House filled in some of the gaps to the official
story related to this high-profile scandal. In a federal court filing, the
White House said it routinely "recycled" backup tapes that housed
administration emails between 2001 and October 2003, meaning it does not
have a record of emails that may have been sent and received by some
administration officials pertaining to the Wilson leak, the occupation of
Iraq, and other historic events for a period of two years. The revelation
came minutes before midnight on January 15, in response to a lawsuit filed
by the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in
Washington (CREW).
CREW, which is also representing the Wilson's in a civil suit against
several White House officials, including Rove and Cheney, sued the White
House last year over what the watchdog group's sources say are the loss of
as many as 10 million emails, which in and of itself is a violation of the
Presidential Records Act. CREW has been seeking information from the White
House about its email preservation policies and the extent of what has been
lost.
The dispute over the missing emails may very well have been relegated
to the apparent violation of the Presidential Records Act, if not for the
fact the time frame in question coincided with the federal criminal
investigation into the leak of Wilson's CIA status, and the fact there was
clear-cut documentary evidence that would later be discovered tying Rove
and Libby to the leak. Moreover, at the time Gonzales enjoined White House
staffers to turn over evidence in their files about the Wilsons, the White
House had publicly exonerated Rove and Libby for playing a role in the
leak.
The details the White House provided in last week's federal court
filing about its email retention policy and the recycling of backup tape
calls into question the integrity of the leak investigation conducted by
special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, particularly as it relates to Karl
Rove, in that it appears Fitzgerald may not have obtained all of the
evidence in the case because the "recycled" backup email tapes may have
contained further documents implicating other officials in the leak or, at
the very least, discussed the matter.
Anne Weismann, chief counsel for CREW, said her group's sources have
told her Fitzgerald has not been told the full story about the extent to
which evidence pertaining to the leak case had not been turned over. She
did not elaborate.
She agreed the integrity of the special prosecutor's probe should be
called into question based on the emails issues revealed in response to her
organization's lawsuit against the White House.
"I was told he [Fitzgerald] was never given the whole story," Weismann
said in an interview with Truthout last week. "We wrote [Fitzgerald] a
letter last April. We have not heard back from him. I have no indication
that [Fitzgerald's] doing anything. But it would be legitimate to conduct a
further inquiry."
One of the murky, unanswered questions in the leak case that has
lingered for some time is the story behind Rove's discovery of a July 2003
email he sent to then Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley that
proved Rove had, at the very least, engaged in a discussion with former
Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper about Joseph Wilson.
The email Rove sent to Hadley never turned up during an exhaustive
document search ordered a year earlier, in September 2003, by Gonzales.
The order Gonzales sent to Rove and other administration officials, 12
hours after Gonzales received notification about the probe from the DOJ,
demanded "documents that related in any way to a contact with any member or
representative of the news media about Joseph C. Wilson, his trip to Niger
in February 2002, or his wife's purported relationship with the Central
Intelligence Agency."
The Rove/Hadley email was not included in the thousands of pages of
documents turned over to the FBI. The reason? Apparently, the "right search
words weren't used," Rove's attorney Robert Luskin told Newsweek in October
2005. The email Rove sent to Hadley in July 2003 has never been released
publicly. It's unclear whether the email was sent via the White House
computer system or from Rove's email account maintained by the Republican
National Committee (RNC), which, according to Congress, is what Rove uses
to conduct 90 percent of his White House business, in what would also
appear to be a violation of the Presidential Records Act.
The story behind the single email that tied Rove to the Plame-Wilson
leak is a complex one. It was Luskin who apparently discovered the email
Rove sent to Hadley. Yet, it took more than a year before the high-powered
Washington, DC, attorney disclosed this crucial fact to Fitzgerald. And it
was disclosed to the special prosecutor only when it became clear Cooper
would lose his legal battle and would be compelled to respond to a subpoena
demanding he reveal the identity of his source who told him Wilson worked
for the CIA. Cooper testified his source was Karl Rove.
After Luskin revealed he had told Fitzgerald his client had in fact
discussed Wilson and her husband with Cooper, suspicions about the timing
of the discovery of the email Rove had sent to Hadley surfaced because Rove
had maintained in sworn testimony before a grand jury and in interviews
with the FBI in October 2003 - a mere three months after he spoke to Cooper
- that he never identified Wilson or her affiliation with the CIA to
reporters. Rove had also been the source that told syndicated columnist
Robert Novak that Wilson worked for the CIA.
Luskin said Rove recalled his conversation with Cooper thanks to a
chance meeting Luskin had with Cooper's Time magazine colleague, Viveca
Novak, sometime in 2004. She told Luskin it was well known within Time
magazine Rove had been a source for Cooper.
That tidbit of information supplied by Novak led Luskin and Rove to
search Rove's files, Luskin claimed. What turned up was the email Rove had
sent to Hadley, which for unknown reasons had not surfaced a year earlier.
This led Rove to change his grand jury testimony, which coincided with a
judge's order compelling Cooper to reveal his source.
But around the time Luskin said he located the email Rove had sent to
Hadley, Fitzgerald had already become suspicious Rove was obstructing his
investigation and might have destroyed evidence implicating him in the
leak. In late January 2004, Fitzgerald sent a letter to then acting
Attorney General James Comey seeking confirmation he had the authority to
investigate and prosecute suspects in the leak case for additional crimes,
including evidence destruction.
Comey responded to Fitzgerald in writing on February 6, 2004,
confirming Fitzgerald did indeed have the authority to prosecute additional
crimes, including "perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence
and intimidation of witnesses."
In October 2005, the same month Luskin spoke with a reporter for
Newsweek, White House counsel Harriet Miers, who succeeded Gonzales, told
special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that some White House emails were not
archived in accordance with the Presidential Records Act, according to
CREW.
The White House's Office of Administration briefed Miers about the
extent of their email issues. Miers is said to have immediately informed
Fitzgerald about it due to Fitzgerald's having subpoenaed White House
emails sent in 2003. However, according to CREW, which alleges as many as
10 million emails are unaccounted for, Fitzgerald's staff was briefed
before a complete audit of the email records could be taken.
Three months later, in a story first reported by Truthout, Fitzgerald
had filed a court document in January 2006 in US District Court in
Washington, DC, stating his investigative team had "learned that not all
email of the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of the
President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal
archiving process on the White House computer system." That document was
filed during the discovery phase of the perjury and obstruction of justice
trial against former vice presidential staffer I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Less than two weeks later, the White House turned over 250 pages of
emails from President Bush and Vice President ***** Cheney's offices to
investigators working for the special prosecutor - more than two years
after the investigation had begun. It's unknown what was contained in those
emails. But Truthout reported at the time, additional emails were withheld
from Fitzgerald's probe by Gonzales, who, as White House counsel, had cited
executive privilege as the reason he would not turn over the
communications.
The White House offered no official explanation concerning the
circumstances regarding the sudden reappearance of the emails it had turned
over to Fitzgerald on February 6, 2006, or if there had been any truth to
Fitzgerald's allegations the emails had not been automatically archived. At
the time, a White House spokeswoman would only say staffers had
"discovered" the batch of documents during a search.
Last week, Congressman Henry Waxman, the Democratic chairman of the
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, released a letter that
says the White House's Office of Administration conducted a study last year
and determined 473 days of emails between 2003 and 2005 are missing from
more than a half-dozen White House agencies. In some instances, the White
House has only found a record of five emails on some days where there
should have been at least 60,000 email communications that have been
swapped between staffers, Weismann said.
To be sure, an aide in Waxman's office said "in its 2005 study, the
Office of Administration did not find any emails for that component on that
day in the server where emails are archived."
The dates where emails are missing for entire days in 2003 coincide
with the former White House Press Secretary's public exoneration of Rove
and Libby for their alleged roles in leaking Plame's identity, an interview
Cheney gave to Tim Russert, host of "Meet the Press," where Cheney
vehemently denied knowing Joe Wilson or any aspect of the leak of his
wife's CIA status, despite the fact court filings show Cheney discussed the
Wilsons with his staff numerous times in the preceding months. Moreover,
the emails went missing a week or so before the FBI first questioned Rove,
Libby and other White House officials about the leak.
Waxman, who has been seeking additional documents and interview
transcripts related to the federal investigation of the CIA leak case, has
called a Congressional hearing for February 15 to hear testimony about the
missing emails and the position maintained by the White House that there is
"absolutely no reason to believe that any e-mails are missing," despite
evidence to the contrary. One document Waxman has been actively trying to
obtain, without success, is a letter Fitzgerald sent to Luskin in June 2006
apparently clearing Rove of criminal exposure for his role in the leak.
In an interview with Truthout last year, Melanie Sloan, the CREW
director, said her organization had no direct evidence proving Rove had
intentionally withheld emails from Fitzgerald's probe. But the CREW
attorneys doubted Rove and the White House had been forthcoming about
Rove's involvement in the leak of Wilson's covert identity in light of the
fact thousands of emails Rove had sent and received during the height of
the leak probe had not been recovered. Moreover, Sloan said it was
difficult to determine whether Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, had been
forthcoming with Fitzgerald about the changing stories Rove and Luskin had
told the special prosecutor regarding Rove's role in the Plame-Wilson leak
and the discovery of the email Rove had sent to Hadley.
"He is a well known lawyer and I would give him the benefit of the
doubt, but there is no way to know if he was telling the truth or not at
this point," Sloan said. But "it looks like Karl Rove may well have
destroyed evidence that implicated him in the White House's orchestrated
efforts to leak Valerie Plame-Wilson's covert identity to the press in
retaliation against her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson." Sloan
also said, "Special counsel Fitzgerald should immediately reopen his
investigation into whether Rove took part in the leak, as well as whether
he obstructed justice in the ensuing leak investigation."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/012208A.shtml
--
"You tried to steal the identity of a James G. Keegan Jr. who did in
fact author a book, and you're trying to convince people that you are
the same person." -- corrupt prison clerk heishman lying as "Osprey"
in an effort to cover-up his earlier lie that i was not an author
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