If every hard drive these missing documents met was not swiped with a magnet we might still find yes ?

Good. I hope Archives gets some answers.

Nice way for them to find out.

CREW is also on the job for this:

http://citizensforethics.org/files/20100225%20-%20Holder%20Letter%20(deleted%20OLC%20emails).pdf

So who was the Bush Administration’s “how to disappear e-mails” Czar? Was that the subject of one of Scott Jennings’ political briefings to appointees?

The whole thing would be comical if not so serious. Yet the Bushies paid it lip service, like in this video recorded by Alberto Gonzalez (when serving as White House counsel) to Bush appointees telling them to preserve records:

http://www.youtube.com/user/ikbenbangde

(The clip is “Gonzalez on FOIA”)

Did John Yoo follow Special Counsel Scott Bloch’s example and ring up Geeks on Call for cleansing?

ot: the director/co-writer of the film “In The Loop” has a great post up at Huffpo on some of the through-the-looking glass comments made by Brit officials justifying taking the nation to war. One in particular is my new stand-in for the circular, illogical governmental b.s. we sift through here daily:

Alastair Campbell Ex-Director of Communications for Tony Blair…

later wrote a letter to the Inquiry team ‘clarifying’ his earlier support for the intelligence dossier. In it, he said he stood by the report because he was in fact in his mind answering a slightly different question relating to the hypothetical re-playing of events but this time without the factual inaccuracies that existed in the first report. He ended by hoping he’d clarified ‘the answer I thought I was giving to the question I thought I was being asked.‘

(emphasis mine)

Mary had a very interesting comment in a prior thread in regard to other sensitive DOJ e-mail disappearing (which I’ll paraphrase)…

From Scott Horton’s recent “Justice’s Vendetta Against a Whistleblower: Six Questions for Jesselyn Radack”:

3. Later, when the Bush Administration decided to try Lindh on criminal charges in a federal court in Virginia, the judge issued a discovery order. How did you find out about it? What did you learn about the Justice Department’s compliance with discovery requests? What did you do about that?

On March 7, I inadvertently learned that the judge presiding over the Lindh case had ordered that all Justice Department correspondence related to Lindh’s interrogation be submitted to the court. Such orders routinely are disseminated to everyone with even a remote connection to the case in question, but I heard about it only because the Lindh prosecutor contacted me directly.

There was more. The prosecutor said he had only two of my e-mails. I knew I had written more than a dozen. When I went to check the hard copy file, the e-mails containing my assessment that the FBI had committed an ethical violation in Lindh’s interrogation were missing.

With the help of technical support, I resurrected the missing e-mails from my computer archives. I documented and included them in a memo to my boss and took home a copy for safekeeping in case they “disappeared” again. Then I resigned.

Granted, we’re talking about hard copy e-mail removed from a file, and JL was able to resurrect it with tech help, but still… More disappearing email…

So right now you have CREW, National Archives, NYTimes and a Congressional hearing all hit on the missing emails – I really don’t rule out this was one reason Leahy held such an otherwise non-sensical hearing. Not for a result from it, but just to have the missing Bush era emails be a headline again – one more helpful to the Dems and Obamaco than some others.

@6 – *G* – She also didn’t get any of the process opportunities that they gave to Bybee and Yoo when OPR recommended her to the DC bar.

I think she’d make a great witness to have on the same panel with Margolis. And she and he can perhaps address how DOJ expects to help us fight terrorism if no one knows how to resurrect a deleted emai and no one thinks a thorough investigation needs to include review of deleted emails.

@6

Come to think of it, what is the “hard copy file” that Jesselyn mentions? Did each DOJ office maintain a “hard copy file” of all e-mails as part of their Federal Records Act responsibilities?

TPM has up that they contacted Yoo’s lawyer, Estrada, who says Yoo knows nothing about the deleted emails.

@8 – the tpm info also says that is exactly how Reno’s emails used to be handled.
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/02/former_doj-ers_doubtful_on_missing_yoo_emails_stor.php#more

Anne Weismann, a top Justice Department lawyer during the Clinton administration who now is with CREW, told TPMmuckraker that the emails of Janet Reno were printed out every week when she was Attorney General, in order to ensure that they were preserved.
“There was no question that people understood,” the need to preserve emails, said Weismann, who worked specifically, in part, on statutes governing federal and presidential records, and who last year led a largely successful legal effort by CREW to have email records from the Bush White House retrieved, after they were said to have been deleted.

That would be individual workstation hard drives that are getting upwards to eight years or more old, even assuming they were brand new when the lost emails were moving around. They are not likely still just sitting there. It is likely only main servers and back up systems left at this point.

“There was no question that people understood,” the need to preserve emails, said Weismann

They understood that torture was banned, too, but that didn’t stop them from doing it and writing crappy memos to cover their rears.

See this comment @166 in “The Emails The Bush Lawyers Were So Worried About” LINK:

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/02/21/the-emails-the-bush-lawyers-were-so-worried-about/#comment-221520

Excuse my being a little off-topic here, but an interesting perspective on how far things have deterioated is provided by this small Army handbook from 2003. Seems almost quaint now that we’ve seen the Yoo, et al., memos.

C92@6, last ¶, make that **JR**

Maybe it is time to ask Jones Day*s S.L.Shadmand [biography] if there are clues already in existence from the 2007 case she carried for National Security Archive (the private entity, as distinguished from the government agency NARA). However, that old case ostensibly addressed **March 2003 through October 2005**, and only EOP rather thatn DOJ. GovTech worked for agencies, in addition to its work for the congress. However, in the EOP matter putatively 22 million emails were produced as part of the out of court settlement; and new EOP guidelines in the interest of *transparency* now even will archive Blackberry messages. I can imagine a lot of Republicans looking for a new uncovenanted technology for communications Real Soon Now.

At some point, people have to stop giving Bush era officials the benefit of the doubt. Every single major scandal of the Bush Administration–except, technically, the warrantless wiretap scandal, but if I were NARA I’d start asking about those emails–has included disappeared emails. I mean, it’s time to stop pretending this is anything but intentional.

And Mitchell Wade’s MZM received the contract for putting IT equipment into Cheney’s office, didn’t it? Wade, the longtime buddy of the guy who was #3 [Dusty Foggo] at CIA under Porter Goss, before the FBI showed up to ransack Foggo’s house for evidence? (Evidence of what, exactly, I never did know…)

So we have a privatized outfit that’s new to government contracting putting IT stuff into Cheney’s VP office in 2000, IIRC. (And if I am incorrect, someone please advise.)

This is the same VP giving contracts to the likes of Blackwater, Halliburton, KBR, etc, etc.

I’m with Mary @7: how does anyone fight terrorism when they can’t even keep email records…?

And, FWIW, if my local school district IT group failed to archive **all** emails and it was discovered that a kid was in contact with a pedophile… there would most definitely be repercussions for the IT crowd.

‘Intentional’? Yes, but also the far more important conclusions: Willful destruction of evidence of possible war crimes AND flat out obstruction of justice.

Both of these are felonies, last I recall. A couple generations ago, men were convicted, imprisoned, and sometimes received capital punishment on flimsier evidence.

So assuming the “Reno system” of retention was still in effect…

and I’m reading Jesselyn correctly, that she was somehow able to page through the paper copies of e-mails that she had sent, to see there were ones missing…

what’s to say that there wasn’t someone else regularly paging through the paper files, reading, picking and shredding?

was there a team of records managers deployed at DOJ who were ‘loyal bushies?’

Thanks. I knew I had seen this theme somewhere earlier!

What was the method of communication for the daily CIA cables from the field to Gonzales? Did those cables flow through the network installed by MZM?

A Justice spokeswoman said the department was “reviewing the letter” and declined further comment. The department is seeking to determine what department policies and procedures were in place at the time to archive or otherwise preserve employee e-mails, according to a source familiar with the department’s review who asked not to be identified because it is ongoing.

It’s not the department policies that are important. It’s the [post Watergate][!] Presidential Records Act of 1978.

Remember Executive Order 13233?
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20040423.html

The Executive Order gutted prior law — specifically, the 1978 Presidential Records Act. The Order granted all former presidents, as well as any persons selected by them, an unprecedented authority to invoke executive privilege to block release of their records. In addition, it granted the power to invoke executive privilege to present and former vice-presidents as well.

Obama rescinded this order, but any damage Bush and the Cheney Gang wanted to do is already done, and “violations of the 1978 Presidential Records Act carry no sanctions whatsoever.”

Congress could have changed this, but, …
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20071116.html

More specifically, one or more secret holds have been placed on the legislation, which surely would pass the Senate with a solid majority, if put to a vote. It seems that Republican Senators are willing to allow the Bush White House to do whatever it wants with its papers. Moreover, the very fact that Bush has threatened to veto any new law that reversed his Executive Order 13233 has been sufficient for the Senate Democrats to back off, since they do not have a veto-proof Senate.

[...of course!]

This comment was made @169 on “The Emails The Bush Lawyers Were So Worried About”

” JasonLeopold February 21st, 2010 at 10:36 pm
169
In response to bobschacht @ 165 (show text)

That’s interesting, Bob. I had also heard, by the way, that Goldsmith kept a separate file of his own emails after he left DOJ and took it with him. Not sure if that means all emails (I assume the ones dealing with the memos are classified?) or if it’s even true”

Can someone supply links for this or similar concerning principals involved?

This is not Presidential Records Act, it is Federal Records Act.

“So, Mrs Wood, how exactly dId you erase those 18 1/2 minutes of tape?”

I mean, it’s time to stop pretending this is anything but intentional

tee hee

marcy, sometimes you are just too funny, really, you think it’s time for them to stop pretending this is an accident?

tee hee, you crack me up

It is hard to believe that there are absolutely no backups. Federal disaster recovery and continuity of operations standards, which their contractors must comply with, require the onsite and offsite backup of emails. There is technically no way that the destruction of these emails could be other than intentional. And some IT person knows who ordered it and probably who ordered them to order it. Oh, yes, it is the DOJ, the folks who investigate — using the FBI, the folks who are among those being investigated.

As long as Mueller is in FBI and not someone committed to the rule of law, nothing will be done. Mueller, like J. Edgar Hoover, has the power over a bunch of political actors. I read the Elliott Spitzer case as a warning to other’s interested in being Elliot Ness.

The deniability, it keeps getting less and less plausible. Good.

A lingering technical question about the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks still haunts some, and it has political implications: How did 200,000 tons of steel disintegrate and drop in 11 seconds?

Was this an inside job done by controlled demolition? The technical issues surrounding the collapse of the towers has prompted years of debate, rebuttal and ridicule.

I am particularly disturbed by Building 7, a 47-story skyscraper, which was not hit by an aircraft, yet came down in “pure free-fall acceleration.”

This isn’t just about an email scandal. Will FDL ever look into the crime of the century? You’re not mainstream mead and the rules don’t apply here – or do they?

Seems like a whole lot of lawmakers don’t give a rip about laws.

I mean, it’s time to stop pretending this is anything but intentional.

well surely when the opposition Party controls Congress and the White House, they will launch ‘investigations’ at the very least!

oh wait, there is no opposition Party.

I guess by ratifying these evasions and mysterious ‘losses’ of govt correspondence, the Democrats are challenging the (R)’s to do something even worse next time they have the chance.

Write a diary at the Seminal; then those of us with some knowledge of materials and engineering can tell you how little you know.

But this is not the place for 9/11conspiracy theories, unelss you like being a troll.

OK. So PRA does not apply to the whole Executive Branch? Thanks for setting me straight on that.

When nip comes to tuck,count on emails suddenly being retrieved if and when needed to absolve Cheney and/or Company…or to frame somebody else.

Deus ex machina.

Their is no need for the emails.

We all ready know they broke the law.

I know it’s considered old-fashioned inside the Beltway, but admissible evidence that proves what we “know” is a useful thing. Indeed, it is essential to the rule of law.

The best person to ask about this would be Mike Connell.

Damn, it’s the ghost of Rosemary Woods. Now she’s haunting DOJ.

So what is the law? You know– the law that spells out what is (was?) to be met regarding these communication records? When I get caught driving while drunk * or doing a break and entry * or walking into the local bank and holding it up * the local and state police right then or soon track me down,arrest and charge me with the crime(s) and jail me. That is how it works for me. So why does this not work in WashingtonDC?

Find out who did not honor or indeed broke the law(s) regarding keeping of all records while G.W.Bush and Dick Cheney were “the deciders” and telling big fat lies over and over. Someone did it. Find out who and go and arrest/charge them and take them to jail.

When we common Americans break the law that is what happens to us. So why not in WashingtonDC?

Actually track down who was responsible and follow the trail upwards as to who was responsible for letting this happen. Arrest them all and then find out where the records are or are not and if they are not around anymore throw the book at these scofflaws,prosecute and convict them and dole out some prison time. If this took place a few times maybe this ” I don’t know ” routine would not happen or happen less often.

If the Rs could go after a D run WH over this kind of stuff the fur and feathers would be flying. You know the Rs would be out for scalps. ( see Clinton WH era )

Dumbshit Ds since 2006 keep doing this no fouls/no consequences act.

Dumbshits.

* fictional suppositions only

I mean, it’s time to stop pretending this is anything but intentional.

I have worked most of my adult life in IT in one capacity or another and I can tell you “You DON”T loose any electronic information” Period !! Period!!
It was damn well intentional… There are NO IT people(if they are truly IT) who would DELETE anything without prior authorization from the top… their asses depend on the fact that nothing is really ever deleted, EVER!!

Alistair has obviously fallen down a rabbit hole and has spent some time in Wonderland.

Bob in AZ

CREW filed a FOIA request earlier “seeking documents that would shed light on the destruction of emails of former high-ranking OLC officials John Yoo and Patrick Philbin.”

Here’s the FOIA letter.

Obviously Building 7 fell from weight of the Enron investigation records that were kept there , along with some other interesting evidence.

May I say from a psychological stand point, Cheney and Bush are “behaving” as if they are guilty of something.

How?

While Cheney was in office he was hidden from view and today he is consistently outspoken. When he speaks out, he literally acts out the behavior of a guilty person. Minimize, deny and blame are the behaviors of the guilty. They minimize their mistakes. We have witnessed this…and I say this factually. We know he made mistakes and that he minimized them. We know he denies almost all wrong doing. We know that he blames Obama frequently. (we could count the number of times to be more factual). From a psychological standpoint, a cop doing an investigative interview would quickly pick up on these behaviors and know that he has his perp. He may not have the facts gathered, may not have his evidence, but he would know by this behavior that this one is guilty.

As to Bush…I think his “hiding” speaks volumes.

with a side trip to the land of rumsfeldia (“That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.”)

They need to go after the little people, you know the ones who do the day to day IT systems… I am sure they will turn instead of spending time in jail. after all they DID the work!! And they don’t have as much in it… the big boys have more to lose for ordering the destruction of backups!! Both on and off site… these systems to protect Data are almost fool proof.. ie the whole area nuked to glass.. Get the Busy Bee workers they KNOW the most of what happened… and who ordered it….

Well put nahant. Subpeona the perps to testify under oath.

For sure… He is taking the low road so no one looks at him and ????? who knows what we don’t know yet… Dam BO and Holder!! Fucking this Country is dying to know what these criminals did!!

Thank you.

I included this in a story I wrote this morning. Not that anyone needs an education on the Federal Records Act, but thought I would share this from the DOJ’s own website–a section called “preserving records”–that clearly states what is a “federal record.” The instructions couldn’t be more explicit and that just shows how right Marcy is when she says “it’s time to stop pretending this is anything but intentional.

The DOJ’s website said emails are federal records if it:

1. Documents agreements reached in meetings, telephone conversations, or other E-mail exchanges on substantive matters relating to business processes or activities
2. Provides comments on or objections to the language on drafts of policy statements or action plans
3. Supplements information in official files and/or adds to a complete understanding of office operations and responsibilities

The DOJ rules for preserving records also said “the unlawful removal or destruction of federal records” can result in “criminal or civil penalties, fines and/or imprisonment.”

That last paragraph made me laugh too :)

The “critical importance” of Mike Connell as some kind of mastermind guru of everything is wildly overrated. Would he have been useful as a witness? Sure, but the meme that he was some kind of Ernst Stavro Blofeld of a giant hub conspiracy is nuts.

proof!! Court likes that, that is if You don’t want to try them in a US Court of Law!!???

Yes, I can’t wait for CREW to breathlessly demand that the DOJ prosecute the DOJ for non-compliance with their little FOIA.

Scott Horton, too!
Where are the Yoo and Philbin Emails?
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/02/hbc-90006607

hahahaha! We should all file FOIAs!

Oliver North couldn’t have said it better, after he tried and was discovered to have failed to do Robert Mac Farland’s bidding.

For the conspiracy folks out there: there have been rumors of a complete, secret, secondary internet system that didn’t/doesn’t touch the civilian internet, within the White House, Pentagon, DoJ and possibly State. Something beyond the encoded routers of SIPRNet. I donno. Cheney/Addington had the mindset and the power/money to it, but seems pretty far fetched IMO. Might explain why the National Archives didn’t know until last Friday’s OPR report that there were missing emails. I presume that the National Archives keeps heading logs of emails on the normal internet like employers do to see who is writing to whom on working hours.

Sibel Edmonds Has Named Names. Why Isn’t The Media

Reporting the Story?

: Brad Friedman
for HUSTLER MAGAZINE – March 2010

SIBEL EDMONDS, a former FBI translator, claims that the following government officials have committed what amount to acts of treason. They are lawmakers Dennis Hastert, Bob Livingston, Dan Burton, Roy Blunt, Stephen Solarz and Tom Lantos, as well as at least three members of George W. Bush’s inner circle: Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Marc Grossman. But is Sibel Edmonds credible?

“Absolutely, she’s credible,” Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told CBS’s 60 Minutes when he was asked about her in 2002. “The reason I feel she’s very credible is because people within the FBI have corroborated a lot of her story.” Edmonds’s remarkable allegations of bribery, blackmail, infiltration of the U.S. government and the theft of nuclear secrets by foreign allies and enemies alike rocked the Bush Administration. In fact, Bush and company actually prevented Edmonds from telling the American people what she knew—up until now.

John M. Cole, an 18-year veteran of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Counterespionage departments, revealed the panic of upper-echelon officials when Edmonds originally started talking back in 2002. “Well, the Bureau is gonna have to try to work something out with Sibel,” Cole said an FBI executive assistant told him at the time, “because they don’t want this to go out and become public.”

But they couldn’t “work something out with Sibel” because, it seems, she wasn’t looking to make a deal. Edmonds says she was looking to expose what she believed to be the ugly truth about the infiltration of the U.S. government by foreign spies. They were enabled, Edmonds claimed, by high-ranking U.S. officials and insider moles planted at nuclear weapons facilities around the nation.

…snip…

http://larryflynt.com/?p=693

Connell was only one ingenious IT*er; in the OH matter, there was another Republican IT architect who gave a depo Spoonamore (four pages), who explained his own bailiwick was topology whereas Connell*s was more **front end**.

There’s been a lot of speculation about Obama’s intentions and ideology, but I think that there’s one metaphor that’s apt – he’s driving the getaway car for BushCo.

Well, you have a point, but there’s a simple way to proceed.

1) OPR informs us that someone told them the emails were deleted and “not recoverable.”

2) Ask the OPR authors who told them that.

3) Ask the person or persons who so informed OPR how they knew the emails were not recoverable, i.e., how they determined this, where they checked, etc.

4) Ask the person or persons why they did not inform the National Archives, as so required by law, when they discovered this. Ask this person or persons who, if anyone outside OPR, this was discussed with.

5) Ask Atty. Gen. Holder why the witness sent by him did not know the answers to the questions above, and why the DOJ portrays itself as having to review the NA letter and determine, now, what the policies were.

6) When the email were discovered missing, who made the determination to assess they were not recoverable?

These are just basic, basic questions.

This is just the beginning of such an investigation, which Congress could do. But they won’t. So we’ll have to do it.

Marcy should be the damn Attorney General, or independent prosecutor, assisted by bmaz and Mary. We’d have this nailed down in a week. Instead, we’ll be hearing BS about this for months, if we’re lucky and the issue isn’t swallowed up by media indifference, or subordination to “the next big story.”

Why bother with this? (directed to @33, who is right on the point of breaking laws) Because it’s a crack of a door left open by which we might, just maybe, be able to get at these people. Those emails, too, which I believe are to/from both WH and Langley, may carry other crucial links or information that will assist us in bringing the criminals to trial someday. You have to think that will happen, and actually it must, because the alternative is too awful to contemplate.

Just as a reminder (and only because I was catching up on reading) this post by Marcy from earlier in the week is a good refresher and would have served Patrick Leahy well had he used it as the basis to ask questions.

Btw, I think it’s worth going back and looking at Margolis’s testimony to the House Judiciary attorneys on May 1, 2007. I don’t have a full link to that, though there are partial links online. Looking at one of the latter (PDF) I can see that Margolis worked on the Wen Ho Lee prosecution, as did Grindler. Perhaps GG is a Margolis man after all. As they all must be at DoJ (those who aren’t, the disgruntled… drop me a line).

The interview is fascinating as regards a view of the man who openly speaks of serving his “masters”. The same link has discussion my McNulty and Margolis re the latter’s role with OPR and OIG investigations. It’s definitely “in the weeds” but worth looking at. If I can find the whole transcript, that would be even better.

Mr. McNulty. From time to time, issues arise with U.S.
attorneys. They may be the subject of an OPR investigation.
They may be the subject of — these issues may be the
subject of information that has not yet gone to OPR but will
be going to OPR, and so, in terms of the use of the word
“performance,” I think this might fall more into a category
called “misconduct,” but there is sometimes a gray line
between performance and misconduct and issues that come up
in the course of those attorneys’ tenure.
The way those are dealt with historically at DOJ — and
to my knowledge, the process has not changed for many years
moving from administration to administration — is that
David Margolis in the Deputy’s Office will handle the
matter, and he will deal with the Executive Office; he will
deal with the OPR if it is an OPR, and he will have to deal
with whoever is doing personnel at the Department….

DAVID MARGOLIS….

20 I was too passive, and I’d like to, I think–and
21 I hold myself accountable for this–that if I had stepped
22 in and said something, that maybe this would have been–
23 we would have handled this better, because I’m used to–
24 the irony is when people have been found to have engaged
25 in misconduct by an OPR investigation or an OIG

01 investigation, historically when they were political
02 appointees as opposed to career people with protections,
03 historically maybe they were just bounced because they had no
04 rights. And, you know, we had this independent finding.
05 When I came on board 14 years ago, it didn’t
06 take me long to change that, and I got some resistance
07 from especially career people, saying, “You’re setting a
08 dangerous precedent by giving some kind of rights to
09 these people who were political appointees.”
10 But I would give them a copy of the report. I’d
11 give them a chance to respond in writing. I’d give them
12 and their attorney–and I’m talking about U.S. Attorneys
13 now specifically–a chance to respond through counsel
14 personally.
15 And then I’d make my decision, and so–but I
16 didn’t insist that happen in this case, and I understand
17 there was a bit of difference. A finding of misconduct,
18 if it’s allowed to stand, you know, follows a lawyer
19 forever.
20 It will stop them from becoming a judge or other
21 positions of public trust….

07 MR. BHARARA: With respect to–
08 MR. MARGOLIS: And I’d like to think that I know
09 how far a career guy should go and when he should defer
10 to the political appointees. But in this case,
11 ironically, I think my tentativeness and lack of
12 aggressiveness–which I’m not known for lack of
13 aggressiveness. I think it did my masters a disservice,
14 and I accept that.

For the conspiracy folks out there: there have been rumors of a complete, secret, secondary internet system that didn’t/doesn’t touch the civilian internet, within the White House, Pentagon, DoJ and possibly State. Something beyond the encoded routers of SIPRNet. I donno. Cheney/Addington had the mindset and the power/money to it, but seems pretty far fetched IMO. Might explain why the National Archives didn’t know until last Friday’s OPR report that there were missing emails.

Not following you, quite. There is nothing particularly sinister about the idea that a specialized, security-critical organization like the USG should keep their networks separated from the public internet. Not even that hard or expensive to do, the ethernet and internet protocol networking gear works exactly the same (except for customized nameservers etc.). Just makes good sense in terms of reducing the likelihood of successful hacking in. Also, there’s no reason why an isolated network such as you describe would be any less able to perform statutorially required data backup operations. maybe I’m missing your point, is there some particular problem you see with that setup?

And still the musical question has no answer:

Who’s Gonna Take the Weight? (youtube, ~6min)

“and then I made my decision….
But in this case, ironically, I think my tentativeness and lack of aggressiveness — which I’m not known for lack of aggressiveness. I think it did my masters a disservice, and I accept that”

In psychology, we therapists know how people reveal themselves. That’s why there can be a close link between psychological interview and interrogation (mainly the aim is totally different). If Margolis said the above and was sitting in my consulting room, I’d say, “Well, David, why is it you think you were not aggressive in this instance?” His protest about not being known for lack of aggressiveness is an admission that he was forced to do something against his sense of identity.

Well, shrink-talk aside, one thing we can see from this is that David Margolis has actually been the one in charge of disciplining — the final-say man — for about the last 20 years. It wasn’t Holder’s decision on Margolis and the OPR report, but DoJ secretive policy and SOP, as revealed through the US Attorneys scandal hearings.

Of course, when his “masters” asked, he became suddenly “tentative”, taking some blame, but really demonstrating that in the case of the US Attorney firings, he would not be playing his usual role.

OT — mcjoan is front-paging Marcy’s “Mock Burial” post right now.

He’s not even hiding his guilt. In fact, he’s flaunting his guilt, and daring us to do anything about it.

Bob in AZ

Hey, anyone notice Rachel Maddow was sporting her tin foil hat tonight?

Bob in AZ

Nadler steps up to the plate:

Dem Rep Sends Yoo And Bybee Materials To Bar Associations For Potential Discipline

LINK.

OT

Any of the Canadians online? Canada facing off with Slovakia right now

USA waiting to play the winner for the gold

San Jose Sharks Patrick Marleau puts Canada up 1 zip

Uh oh, sports startin’.

See all y’all. Go be with your loved ones, it’s been a hell of a week.

The word is “conspiracy.”

Call it what it is.

You’re welcome.

(I get so f*cking tired of their theories, all of which fail to pass basic ‘properties of materials’ and ‘statics’. including some of the ones being pushed by architects, who as far as I can tell only do ‘designs’, and rely on engineers to actually come up with the construction drawings.)

tarheel dem @25

well now,
that’s something to think about.

i don’t really have a fix on mueller.

in fact, i’ve taken him for granted.

maybe i shouldn’t have.

“In his new Epilogue for this 2008 edition, Newman explains why only someone who a.) Understood the inner workings of the national security state, and b.) Understood and controlled Oswald’s files, could have masterminded something as superhumanly complex as this scheme. One in which the conspiracy itself actually contained the seeds that would sprout the cover-up.

In this new chapter, Newman names James Angleton as the designer of the plot. (p. 637) He also names Anne Goodpasture, David Phillips’ assistant in Mexico City, as the person who hatched the internal CIA cover up by saying the ersatz tapes had been destroyed in October. This is evidenced in a cable she sent on 11/23 (pgs 633-634). Yet she probably knew this was false. Because she later testified to the ARRB that a voice dub of a tape had been carried to the Texas border on 11/22/63, the night before she sent the cable (p. 654). Further, Win Scott had made his own voice comparison after the assassination. He could not have if the tapes had been destroyed. (p. 635) Angleton made sure Scott’s voice comparison never became public by swooping into Mexico City and confronting, nearly threatening, Win Scott’s widow after he died. Once he was inside the house, he removed four suitcases of materials from Scott’s office. This included the contents of his safe where the Mexico City/Oswald materials had been stored. (p. 637)”

But Susan Cooper, a spokeswoman for the Archives, says the first time Archive officials became aware of the missing e-mails is when the OPR report was released last Friday night.

“We want some answers,” says Cooper. “Why were they destroyed—and why weren’t we notified?” Cooper emphasized that the Archives has no evidence there was any willful destruction.

Why doesn’t the National Archives know exactly how many emails are missing? I presume that they should be keeping logs, logs at least as complex as the logs that employers and the NSA keep (the NSA keeping them on every American). So I guess that means that there is a secret system that was in use, as the CT folks have been saying exists all along. Yes there should be encoding, encryption, and hacker proof systems, but the output should be archived, even if it is secret or top secret.

Oops. The above is a reply to Hmmm at 62.

First they have to know about them.
Then they have to have enough information to actually catalog them.

If they don’t know that something even existed, what do you expect to happen?

If they don’t know that something even existed, what do you expect to happen?

Exactly. The NSA (presumably, I’m not an insider) and employers, have automatic email logs which capture headers, time, to – from, bcc etc. Those logs are backed up and have pointers to the actual emails (NSA says they don’t keep the emails themselves), which are also backed up, presumably in a different place (although the DBA business is frequently scrimped upon and the unknowledgeable are frequently hired to deal with it, so mistakes happen).

The National Archives should automatically have both the logs and the emails from both systems (if indeed there are 2 ) and they should be able to tell a) that any/all email is created, at which time, and by whom and b) when/if any email is deleted, and by whom. My guess is that the National Archives did not know about the second system(IMO a biggie in security/archival lasps), which I guess means there has to be legal/Congressional action to get the second system into the Archives.

There was more. The prosecutor said he had only two of my e-mails. I knew I had written more than a dozen. When I went to check the hard copy file, the e-mails containing my assessment that the FBI had committed an ethical violation in Lindh’s interrogation were missing.

With the help of technical support, I resurrected the missing e-mails from my computer archives. I documented and included them in a memo to my boss and took home a copy for safekeeping in case they “disappeared” again. Then I resigned.

Link.
Jesselyn Raddack goes to hard copy files, doesn’t find what she needs, so she goes to the IT department and gets the info off of her hard drive. <== that is worrisome. It sounds like they just officially kept, and then later sent paper over to the National Archives, not the hard drives, servers, logs or whatever (tapes??). If it is a paper archive only, and not even a printout of the logs, we don't have a ghost of a chance of finding out what actually happened. Ever. In that case the Federal Archive laws need to dragged into this century.

Well, nahant, is a bit more enthusiastic than I am about this, but nahant is correct. These emails did not disappear by accident. I managed to preserve emails from an underfunded unit at an underfunded state university for more than a decade. Nothing ever disappeared and I experienced a couple of hardware failures during that time–but that didn’t matter because the backup plan was in place and what do you know it worked. You don’t think the White House had a similar plan in place? You don’t think the Justice Department had a similar plan in place?

How did all these messages disappear from DOJ and the White House? How did all these messages from a convenient time manage to disappear? Trust me, the grunts needed to help. Why haven’t you asked the grunts about it Mr. Conyers, Mr. Leahy? They have the answers. Of course, since they had to have done something illegal to make those messages disappear you’ll have to grant them immunity but oh, well, after you grant them immunity they’ll have to name the person who told them to make the messages disappear. Seems like a fair trade to me.

There is no way in hell all those email messages disappeared without help from the nerds who ran the system. There is just no way. Hey, I know, I am nerd. It would have been my ass to have all this stuff disappear. I want to know did a bunch of nerds get fired for cause from DOJ and the White House or not for all these disappeared emails? It’s clear they weren’t doing their job, correct? Any nerd I know worth his or her salt would be jumping up and down saying they did their job correctly and preserved those emails–because they would have preserved those emails. To my knowledge nobody is running around saying, “it wasn’t me. Those messages were backed up on tape (magnetic media of some sort, etc.)” Someone had to destroy them. The nerds responsible for the White House and DOJ systems destroyed them. Someone ordered them to destroy them. So, who gave the orders?

Good luck getting conservatives and DINOs to fund that sort of thing,especially when they’d prefer that their incriminating mail be permanently lost.

Even worse, good luck in getting anybody to enforce federal laws against destroying or disappearing those files in the first place. Such a travesty!

One thing that I haven’t seen mentioned is ego. Nerds are all about being competent. In the IT world If someone implies you are not up to snuff it’s a big insult and typically the not-so-competent nerd gets all pissy. Missing emails go to the heart of what it means to be a nerd. If you maintain an email system you maintain all the emails. Stuff doesn’t go missing. No nerd I know would let emails just disappear.

It goes directly to their nerdly competence. If we knew the names of the people in charge of the White House and DOJ systems and published things like “the administrator of the WhiteHouse/DOJ email system clearly were incompetent because emails from time x to time y disappeared but emails from time z to time a were preserved they would come out and defend themselves. They couldn’t help themselves because it is such a huge insult implying they weren’t properly maintaing their systems–clearly they weren’t but I doubt they read firedoglake.

So, let’s hear from the administrators of the DOJ and White House systems. Let them testify under oath. Nobody has anything to hide, correct?

Funny you should mention the late Mike Connell. Believe it or not, MAXIM Magazine has a lengthy story on him in their Feb 2010 issue.

Note that it’s on their website under “Humor” and “Stupid Fun”… ;^} (ps: I found a reference to it in the Wikipedia article on him, HONEST!!!)

this soooo ot – really! these conspiracy theories are fuelled by inadequate investigations for sure but there are other fora for that

““We want some answers,” says Cooper. “Why were they destroyed—and why weren’t we notified?” Cooper emphasized that the Archives has no evidence there was any willful destruction.”

Cooper asked “why were they destroyed, and why weren’t we notified”

“no evidence?”

I would think the fact that they were destroyed is enough evidence.

“professionally scrubbed” as I believe Jeff Kaye stated since they are allegedly “unrecoverable”

Why is it that Leahy did not have a IT professional in that hearing to address why those emails are not “recoverable” And who, when and why they may have been “professionally scrubbed”

Hmmm…. missing emails? Here’s some technical background for anyone who’s interested. The DOJ uses Microsoft Exchange (and was even when Yoo was there, AFAIK). During the U.S. Attorney scandal we found out that DOJ uses Symantec’s Enterprise Vault to archive their email. I don’t think that was in place when Yoo was there, but I’m not sure about that. That might explain the ‘printing out email’ procedure in the Radack case.

Yoo’s missing email raises an interesting side note about all this. The stuff he was working on (torture, warrantless wiretapping, etc.) included the most highly classified material of the Bush administration, but he talked about enough details in his emails that he almost surely was violating the classification rules. That fact may have something to do with the fact that some of his email is missing.

Would it have been appropriate for Leahy to have an IT professional in the hearing?

Revising my@57, not depo, was a declaration by web architect. The Connell and Spoonamore documents include several flowcharts of the putative man in the middle attack in the OH2004 election, e.g., there. The archive holding these and related documents at OH State is there.

Interesting in the parallel systems EOP 22 million emails recovery settlement was the initial opprobrium expressed by Payton in the hearing, depicting a cost of millions of dollars to do the forensics; which effort evidently must have occurred subsequently to produce the now NARA held 22 million Bushco EOP emails. I wonder if the latter are searchable Now by historians. Some of their metadata might be interesting, as in the USA purge scandal, affording ways to reconstruct the timing and location of the people who were cascading thru the formerly traditional separation of EOP from DoJ. The Yoo and Bybee email erasure seems like a similar m.o., and likely equally as resolvable. MSE2002 sounds like a solid place to start, as well.

Yoo: It’s Not the Crime, It’s the Coverup–I Know a Thing or Two About Missing E-mails
by Jesselyn Radack; 2/27/10

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/2/27/841265/-Yoo:-Its-Not-the-Crime,-Its-the-CoverupI-Know-a-Thing-or-Two-About-Missing-E-mails

and to bmaz @10,
I’m no IT expert, but I do know that deleting emails off the face-of-the-earth in a corporate or institutional setting where there are mandatory backup-and-restore practices as part of catastrophe planning is NOT easy or simple, because of all the multiple copies generated by such practices. So whenever I hear “the emails can’t be found” or “the emails were mistakenly deleted”, my bullshit detector starts blaring sirens. A prosecutor with subpoena power could prove near omnipotent in recovering lost emails if he or she threatened to seize all affected hard drives, servers, computers, etc. short of getting the recovered files. The IT guys would all of a sudden get very cooperative.

Nice lay out of the questions that should be asked.

Here are a few more.

1) Were these the only emails lost and not recoverable, or are their others?

2) Were these losses also reported to the Archives?

3) If no other emails were lost, what accounts for the odd selectivity of the lost emails? Does this not suggest intentionality of destruction?

4) If other emails were lost, but not complete systemic losses, what accounts for these losses?

5) Wouldn’t lawyers concerned about ethical and legal probity have an even higher standard to meet regarding the maintenance of these records and informing the National Archives when they were destroyed?

6) If Yoo was not aware of the loss of these emails, as his lawyers asserts, then why wasn’t he informed of the losses, interviewed about them being lost, and asked if he kept any notes or hard copies of the messages?

7) Was he questioned at all about the destruction? And if not, WHY not?

The National Archives is also the repository of all Classified documents, I recall. They have restricted areas for those who need such documents. But if Yoo was blithely discussing classified materials with those who were not cleared to handle such information in a “Need To Know” capacity then that would stand to be yet another unethical, and probably criminal, act. But if he destroyed the discussions on the basis of this…that he didn’t want his violations to be discovered…well that’s additional charges: destruction of evidence of a criminal act.

You will likely be branded a lunatic just for asking, but you’re not. The pools of hot molten steel many levels below ground, covered in debris, that burned for a month (even while being constantly inundated with water) is truly the ‘smoking gun’.

The nano thermite used to bring down those buildings has been positively identified in the dust residue by foreign scientists. My guess is that after the unsuccessful attempt to bring down the towers with the dynamite in the van a few years earlier, the buildings were prewired for destruction in case of a similar attack. You could make the argument that it would be better to bring them straight down than to let them fall over. That’s my likely scenario for the charges being in place. There’s no doubt those buildings didn’t fall like they did only as a result of the airplane collisions and low temp kerosene fires. ae911truth.org.

Enjoy.

I appreciate your replying, but with respect I still don’t follow your logic. IIUC, the National Archives gets stuff only after the agencies are done with it, not on an ongoing basis while the administration is in office. You really lose me when you get into suppositions about what the NSA might be doing because even if you’re right about that, the NSA as an agency presence hasn’t popped up in this investigation, and due to their extremely secretive character I can see no reason why we should expect them to have been at any point sharing information with the National Archives whose nature is sort of the exact opposite — preserve information in the interest of making it available. Though any info you may have linking the two in that way, I’d very much like to know about.