And it continues. More findings just popping up, even without the hard shovel of impeachment hearings. The washington post reports, in an article titled, White House Says It Routinely Overwrote E-Mail Tapes From 2001-2003:
E-mail messages sent and received by White House personnel during the first three years of the Bush administration were routinely recorded on tapes that were "recycled," the White House's chief information officer said in a court filing this week.
During the period in question, the Bush presidency faced some of its biggest controversies, including the Iraq war, the leak of former CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson's name and the CIA's destruction of interrogation videotapes.
White House spokesman Tony Fratto said he has no reason to believe any e-mails were deliberately destroyed.
From 2001 to October 2003, the White House's practice was to use the same backup tape each day to copy new as well as old e-mails, he said, making it possible that some of those e-mails could still be recovered even from a tape that was repeatedly overwritten. "We are continuing to analyze our systems," Fratto said last night.
The court filing said tapes were recycled before October 2003, and at that point, the White House "began preserving and storing all backup tapes."
Any data/information technology expert knows that this is not acceptable. Now, the history of the Bush admin is to ignore the counsel of experts and to use the opinion of neocons or partisans. I can just imagine some right wingnut washtington insider say something like, "that computer geek doesn't know sh*t about politics. We can keep erasing these damning emails on a daily basis and use the "economy" excuse as plausible deniability."
Sorry, but this is totally not plausible nor deniable. It's so screaming freaking obvious. Any tech administration who set it up knew the rules, knew the laws and went ahead and did it anyway. This is a great example of how a lower level member of the Bush admin could be leaned upon to testify against higher level Bush admin leaders. It's the kind of testimony that may only come when impeachment hearings are held and Bush and Cheney lose the right of executive privilege to block testimony.
The Wapo article reported,
Two federal statutes require presidential communications, including e-mails involving senior White House aides, to be preserved for the nation's historical record, and some historians responded to the court disclosure yesterday by urging that the White House's actions be thoroughly probed.
"There certainly could have been hugely important materials there . . . and of course they're not owned by President Bush or anybody in the administration, they're owned by the public," said presidential historian and author Robert Dallek. "Given how secretive this administration has been, it of course fans the flames and suspicions about what has been destroyed here. I hope we'll get an investigation."
The White House's electronic record-keeping system has been under scrutiny for months by congressional Democrats and is the subject of several lawsuits, one of which prompted the latest disclosures. The administration has previously acknowledged problems with the White House archiving system, but until Tuesday had not disclosed its practice of recycling backup tapes before 2003.
Although the White House said in the filing that its practice of recording over the tapes ceased after October 2003, it added that even some e-mails transmitted through the end of 2005 might not have been fully preserved.
They're laying up an excuse to explain later missing evidence.
People say it is too late for impeachment. That's ignorance talking. It's not too late for Bush to stage more Gulf on Tonkin incidents, like he flubbed in the Strait of Hormuz. It's not too late for Bush to start a war. It's not too late for him to replace another supreme court justice, if one dies or retires. The nightmare scenarios go on and on. But the bottom line is Nancy Pelosi is failing to pursue her constitutional duty to INVESTIGATE crimes by Cheney and Bush.
This latest example is just one to be added to dozens of offenses.
Pelosi says impeachment will take up too much time. That is an outright lie. Impeachment didn't stop congress, when it was investigating Richard Nixon, according to former membe of congress, on the investigational committee, Elizabeth Holtzman.
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