New Clues in Plamegate

Posted on February 1, 2006

Finally, some interesting news about what special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has been up to in Plamegate. Scooter Libby's lawyers requested a document dump of all the evidence that Fitzgerald has against him. So he complied. But in the cover letter enclosing the documents, Fitzgerald let a bomb drop: he doesn't have all the White House emails pertaining to Plamegate because someone at the White House deleted them.

RAW STORY has acquired a letter from CIA leak Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to Vice President Dick Cheney's former Chief of Staff, I. Lewis Libby, who was indicted for allegedly obstructing justice and other charges for his role in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame.
In the letter, Fitzgerald admits that he has been told some emails from the President and Vice President's offices have been deleted, though he cautions that "no pertinent evidence has been destroyed."
"In an abundance of caution," he writes, "we advise you that we have 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 achiving process on the White House computer system."
The New York Daily News' James Meek reported this morning that "CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald collected 10,000 pages of documents - including the most sensitive terrorism memos in the U.S. government - from Vice President Cheney's office, he said in court papers released yesterday.
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Meek added: "Fitzgerald, who is fighting Libby's request, said in a letter to Libby's lawyers that many e-mails from Cheney's office at the time of the Plame leak in 2003 have been deleted contrary to White House policy."

So someone was deleting emails before they got into the official archiving system. How interesting. Is it a modern-day Rosemary Woods?