White House Must Answer For Missing Emails

Lucas123 writes "A District Court judge this week ruled in favor of a Washington-based watchdog group, allowing them to question White House officials about missing emails involving controversial issues. The subjects include the release of the identity of a former CIA operative, the reasons for launching the war in Iraq and actions by the US Department of Justice. The group had filed suit [PDF] last May against the White House Office of Administration, seeking access to White House email under the federal Freedom of Information Act. The discovery ruling is bringing to light issues of email retention in businesses and other private organizations. We've previously discussed the White House's difficulties with email."

Re:How will they enforce it?

[jollyreaper]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGpWtTJmfvY [youtube.com]

Ah, here it is. We don't torture, never tortured, oh wait, we tortured three people. So now will we investigate? No. Fucker.

Re:Expected answer

[TubeSteak]

Alberto-i-do-not-recall-Gonzales
http://www.google.com/search?q= [google.com]"i+do+not+recall"

I wonder if the questioning will be under oath & videotaped.
At the minimum it'll make for a funny highlight reel.

Re:How will they appeal it?

[Harmonious Botch]

Why prosecute when a SCOTUS justice indicates that he would reverse on appeal?

US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Tuesday defended the use of harsh physical interrogation techniques, saying in an interview with Law in Action on BBC Radio 4 that they may be justified to deter an immediate threat. Scalia argued that "so-called torture" may not necessarily be prohibited by the US constitution, as he said the Eighth Amendment bar against "cruel and unusual punishment" was only intended to apply to criminal punishments:

Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to find out where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited under the Constitution? Because smacking someone in the face would violate the Eighth Amendment in a prison context. You can't go around smacking people about. Is it obvious that what can't be done for punishment can't be done to exact information that is crucial to this society? It's not at all an easy question, to tell you the truth.

Just to mollify shoot-the-messenge moderators, I favor impeaching Scalia for this.

Re:Expected answer

[Zollui]

There's a government mechanism for dealing with such matters which people here might find surprising.

In fulfilment of a legal obligation. a request will be made to administrators and office staff to check their email accounts for the 'missing email'. The managers will accept the word of the staff under them, who will typically eyeball their inbox in Outlook before reporting 'no, haven't got it'.

Don't assume they're grepping through their servers because if they're just responding to a freedom of information request, they're not. They will restrict themselves to a search that seems 'reasonable' in the eyes of a technological illiterate, that's all.

Re:How will they enforce it?

[sgt_doom]

My humble suggestion would be exactly what they FBI did in the aftermath of those attacks of 9/11/01. They sent the damaged disk drives recovered from the two fallen towers to the German data recovery firm, Convar (given the possible classified nature, why wouldn't they have used government labs at NIST, NSA, DIA (yes, they have 'em), etc., or at least the state-of-the-art data recovery companies in North America? Oh yeah....Kroll purchased Convar the same time said data recovery was occurring. Oh yeah....whatever did the FBI do with the data, which a Convar spokesperson said had been successfully recovered? Oh well.......and so it goes.....

Re:Expected answer

[click2005]

If either Bush or Cheney were impeached, arrested and locked up I bet the other would pardon him right before he left office.

how cute

[Anonymous Coward]

parakeet on a penis

Re:Expected answer

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they learned it from Clinton

http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/08/23/wh.email/ [cnn.com]

Well...

[jwietelmann]

If you believe Greg Palast, those emails aren't so lost after all. His claim [gregpalast.com] is that Rove and company messed up and accidentally sent a bunch of those emails to http://georgewbush.org/ [georgewbush.org] addresses instead of http://georgewbush.com/ [georgewbush.com]. If these emails are genuine, they detail, among other things, how Republican operatives used a practice called caging [wikipedia.org] to suppress probable opposition voters.

Of course given the nature of email, it's probably not provable that the email is genuine. And it doesn't help that Palast has a bit of a muckraker reputation. From what I've seen, he does have a bit of a bias, but I've never known him to fabricate his evidence. Personally I'm inclined to believe the emails are real, but, like I said, I'm not sure you can prove that. Unless of course they also turn up in the White House archives.

Oh, right. Nevermind.

Re:Expected answer

[jd]

Rove, et al, have worked so desperately hard to create an illusion of guilt hiding in innocence that it is almost impossible for them to have been as guilty as they have made themselves look. It's a wonderful paradox. Like a small child who pretends it was the invisible man, the pretense magnifies any real guilt as well as an electron tunneling microscope and the pretense adds to that guilt. This is not political, in that most people do the same thing. It's just that humanity has had a few hundred thousand years to develop better methods of dealing with things.

Re:Expected answer

[Digitus1337]

I had the honor of meeting Senator Cleland just prior to the 2004 Presidential election while he was campaigning for John Kerry. It was in a small room (in which I happen to be taking a course now) at the University of Central Florida, and the crowd was tiny. I was able to talk with him (and former Ambassador Pete Peterson) briefly and to shake his hand. He spoke then about how screwed up we were thanks to GWB's first term, and warned about what the second would be like. It's been almost four years, looks like he was right.

nice try

[Scudsucker]

Clinton was impeached for lying under oath

No, he was impeached because the Republicans wanted to impeach him. By any means necessary. Whitewater didn't work. Vince Foster didn't work. So they settled on the excuse of a manufactured perjury charge [huppi.com]:

During the Paula Jones deposition, President Clinton was asked if he had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. But before the questioning began, the Jones' lawyers produced the following legal definition of sexual relations:

"For the purposes of this deposition, a person engages in sexual relations when the person knowingly engages in or causes:

1. Contact with the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of any person with an intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person;
2. Contact between any part of the person's body or an object and the genitals or anus of another person; or
3. Contact between the genitals or anus of the person and any part of another person's body.

Contact means intentional touching, either directly or through clothing."

A lengthy debate followed between the two teams of lawyers. It turned out points 2 and 3 were too broad: anyone accidentally brushing their hips against another person could be accused of having "sex." Judge Susan Webber Wright therefore eliminated points 2 and 3. However, notice that point 3 would have clearly included oral sex performed on Clinton. Its removal set the stage for the controversy to follow.

The Jones' lawyers then asked Clinton if he had sex with Monica Lewinsky based on the remaining definition.

Unfortunately, the definition still contained ambiguities. Who are the "persons" mentioned in the definition? Clinton interpreted it this way:

"For the purposes of this deposition, a person [the deponent, in this case, Clinton] engages in sexual relations when the person [Clinton] knowingly engages in or causes:

1. Contact with the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of any person [that is, any other person, in this case, Monica Lewinsky] with an intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person [Lewinsky];

Contact means intentional touching, either directly or through clothing."

Given that understanding, the definition clearly does not include oral sex performed on Clinton. Why? Because oral sex is performed with the mouth, and "mouth" is not listed among the other body parts in point 1. Furthermore, a man receiving oral sex is generally considered to be receiving pleasure rather than giving it, and so fails the criterion "to arouse or gratify the sexual desire" of Ms. Lewinsky. Which may make Clinton sexually selfish, but that is not illegal.

Some have argued that Clinton's interpretation of "person" is wrong, and that makes him guilty of perjury. But his interpretation is reasonable at most, and arguable at least. Even if Clinton did misinterpret the most obvious meaning, it is up to prosecutors to prove that he intended to lie about it rather than he was mistaken, something that is impossible to prove. And in any case, it is up the to the prosecution to agree to definitions that are not ambiguous. The Jones' lawyers could have easily eliminated any confusion by replacing the term "person" with "deponent and any second party," but they did not. They could have also asked follow-up questions to clarify anything - indeed, they were invited to by Clinton's lawyers - but they did not. The whole incident is a classic case of prosecutorial incompetence.

The only way to prove that Clinton lied, much les

Re:Expected answer

[Scudsucker]

They didn't prosecute Clinton for the sex, they prosecuted him for lying under oath.

No, they prosecuted him because they wanted to prosecute him, because he didn't lie [huppi.com].

Re:Expected answer

[h4rm0ny]

So if you have evidence with which to impeach Bush (and I'm not disputing that), then why isn't he impeached? Who is eligible to start the impeachment procedure in the USA?

For that matter, who is eligible to bring War Crimes charges against Blair in the UK? Something he is also guilty of for lying about WMD to get a war started.

Re:Expected answer

[rbanffy]

"witch hunt."?!

Unlike previous witches, there are strong indications of guilt for these.

Just a few things that come to mind:

- Lying about the reasons to wage a war - the executive branch sure had intel that showed there were little reason to believe Iraq had acquired WMDs and sure they want it to be hidden, thus the violations of the PRA.
- Asking the Congress to authorize a war based on presumably known faulty intelligence.
- Destroying any good will the US had after the 9/11 attacks in a frivolous war. More people hate the US now than probably ever and it will be ages before you recover from it.
- Assigning reconstruction contracts, according to shady criteria, to political allies.
- Compromising positions in Afghanistan because resources are being spent on a war that worsens things even more.
- Overthrowing the only non-theocratic regime in the region, giving way to a civil war that will eventually result in another theocracy. The US should have negotiated with Saddam. It's not that hard to negotiate when you can nuke someone.
- Shielding themselves from prosecution behind a "national security" veil. Misuse of this veil compromises its credibility and is extremely erosive to civil rights.

The current office is a disgrace for the US. I used to have more faith in your democracy.

There will be a lot of rebuilding to do after they are gone.

Re:Expected answer

[Zollui]

The guys will be mostly interested in making sure that no blame accrues to them in the matter. So the only thought going through their heads is: 'how do I make this thing go away with as little trouble to myself as possible?'

From this point, it depends on several external factors, such as whether there's a general understanding around the office that if the email(s) are found, it could mean trouble for an individual with seniority, or a general sort of trouble for people involved in the matter. Also, it depends on what would happen if someone found the email. I don't think anyone involved will not be under the impression that merely finding it would imply a sort of guilt by association. For example, suppose someone did find the email. Questions will follow, e.g. 'where did you find it?', 'how did you find it?', and then move on to 'why didn't you find it earlier?'. What would then happen is a search on the employee's record for any suggestion of a history of impropriety, with a view to establishing whether it's possible to scapegoat that employee when it's time to go public by saying 'X was untrustworthy - it was his fault - officials are investigating the authenticity of the alleged email in the light of the way it was discovered and the official responsible, etc.'

In summary, if nobody has any personal advantage in finding the email, then the mechanism for 'searching' for it will first involve making it generally understood that this is an 'important' email and its content may have implications for senior people (to make individuals anxious about the limelight falling on them in a negative way), and then a lax method of searching for the email will be deployed (i.e. literally asking people to do a quick 5-minute check and then give an assurance that they don't have it). This way, managers are covered. Everyone will understand that if the email is found, the press office and policy unit will have sole responsibility for producing a cover story, and heads will have to roll. And when on board a ship, some levels are more expendable than others - ultimately the bridge and the captain have to be protected at all costs.