Gonzales must resign now. "Mistakes were made."

Attaboy, Mysteryman, pretend to confuse copies of documents from a case not connected to any action of government (and which ultimately resulted in no charges being filed against anyone with a last name beginning with C.) and those -now, some have said four million-- emails directly relating to how government officials, who are supposed to act in the public's interest, were really acting.

Bubbie, please understand. These people are not your friends. They are screwing you over as much as they are screwing the rest of us over.

Roger that?

Joe(over)Nation

Heh,h heh. He said "bubbie"


Sn(snicker)ood

It must have been the bagel I was eating while writing that.

Kid comes home from his first day at school. He is not happy.
"Oy, Bubulah" says his Jewish momma, "What's wrong, bubbie, my bubbie didn't like school?"
"I liked school." the kid says frowning.
"So Bubulah, what's not to to be happy? Didn't you make friends, bubulah?"
"I made friends, ma. All new friends with new friend names."
"That's good!! Bubbie, that's good, Bubulah sweetie. So what's wrong?"
"I found out that my. name. is. not. Bubulah!!!."

Joe(They made me stop calling my youngest Pookie when he was four)Nation

Krugman again hits a homerun with the following. It speaks to the administration giving critical appointments to religious-right zealots.



^4/13/07: For God's Sake

By PAUL KRUGMAN

In 1981, Gary North, a leader of the Christian Reconstructionist
movement -- the openly theocratic wing of the Christian right -- suggested
that the movement could achieve power by stealth. "Christians must begin
to organize politically within the present party structure," he wrote,
"and they must begin to infiltrate the existing institutional order."

Today, Regent University, founded by the televangelist Pat Robertson to
provide "Christian leadership to change the world," boasts that it has
150 graduates working in the Bush administration.

Unfortunately for the image of the school, where Mr. Robertson is
chancellor and president, the most famous of those graduates is Monica
Goodling, a product of the university's law school. She's the former top
aide to Alberto Gonzales who appears central to the scandal of the fired
U.S. attorneys and has declared that she will take the Fifth rather than
testify to Congress on the matter.

The infiltration of the federal government by large numbers of people
seeking to impose a religious agenda -- which is very different from
simply being people of faith -- is one of the most important stories of
the last six years. It's also a story that tends to go underreported,
perhaps because journalists are afraid of sounding like conspiracy
theorists.

But this conspiracy is no theory. The official platform of the Texas
Republican Party pledges to "dispel the myth of the separation of church
and state." And the Texas Republicans now running the country are doing
their best to fulfill that pledge.

Kay Cole James, who had extensive connections to the religious right and
was the dean of Regent's government school, was the federal government's
chief personnel officer from 2001 to 2005. (Curious fact: she then took
a job with Mitchell Wade, the businessman who bribed Representative
Randy "Duke" Cunningham.) And it's clear that unqualified people were
hired throughout the administration because of their religious connections.

For example, The Boston Globe reports on one Regent law school graduate
who was interviewed by the Justice Department's civil rights division.
Asked what Supreme Court decision of the past 20 years he most disagreed
with, he named the decision to strike down a Texas anti-sodomy law. When
he was hired, it was his only job offer.

Or consider George Deutsch, the presidential appointee at NASA who told
a Web site designer to add the word "theory" after every mention of the
Big Bang, to leave open the possibility of "intelligent design by a
creator." He turned out not to have, as he claimed, a degree from Texas
A&M.

One measure of just how many Bushies were appointed to promote a
religious agenda is how often a Christian right connection surfaces when
we learn about a Bush administration scandal.

There's Ms. Goodling, of course. But did you know that Rachel Paulose,
the U.S. attorney in Minnesota -- three of whose deputies recently
stepped down, reportedly in protest over her management style -- is,
according to a local news report, in the habit of quoting Bible verses
in the office?

Or there's the case of Claude Allen, the presidential aide and former
deputy secretary of health and human services, who stepped down after
being investigated for petty theft. Most press reports, though they
mentioned Mr. Allen's faith, failed to convey the fact that he built his
career as a man of the hard-line Christian right.

And there's another thing most reporting fails to convey: the sheer
extremism of these people.

You see, Regent isn't a religious university the way Loyola or Yeshiva
are religious universities. It's run by someone whose first reaction to
9/11 was to brand it God's punishment for America's sins.

Two days after the terrorist attacks, Mr. Robertson held a conversation
with Jerry Falwell on Mr. Robertson's TV show "The 700 Club." Mr.
Falwell laid blame for the attack at the feet of "the pagans, and the
abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians," not to
mention the A.C.L.U. and People for the American Way. "Well, I totally
concur," said Mr. Robertson.

The Bush administration's implosion clearly represents a setback for the
Christian right's strategy of infiltration. But it would be wildly
premature to declare the danger over. This is a movement that has shown
great resilience over the years. It will surely find new champions.
----------------------------------------------------------

Yoohoo! Thomas...Nimh... yoohoo!

Rove E-Mail Sought by Congress May Be Missing
Rove E-Mail Sought by Congress May Be Missing
RNC Took Away His Access to Delete Files in 2005
By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 13, 2007; A01

A lawyer for the Republican National Committee told congressional staff members yesterday that the RNC is missing at least four years' worth of e-mail from White House senior adviser Karl Rove that is being sought as part of investigations into the Bush administration, according to the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

GOP officials took issue with Rep. Henry Waxman's account of the briefing and said they still hope to find the e-mail as they conduct forensic work on their computer equipment. But they acknowledged that they took action to prevent Rove -- and Rove alone among the two dozen or so White House officials with RNC accounts -- from deleting his e-mails from the RNC server. Waxman (D-Calif.) said he was told the RNC made that move in 2005.

In a letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, Waxman said the RNC lawyer, Rob Kelner, also raised the possibility that Rove had personally deleted the missing e-mails, all dating back to before 2005. GOP officials said Kelner was merely speaking hypothetically about why e-mail might be missing for any staffer and not referring to Rove in particular.

The disclosures helped fan the controversy over what the White House has acknowledged to be the improper use of political e-mail accounts to conduct official government business.

Democrats are suspicious that Rove and other senior officials were using the political accounts, set up by the RNC, to avoid scrutiny from Congress. E-mails already in the public record suggest that at least some White House officials were mindful of a need not to discuss certain matters within the official White House e-mail system.

Yesterday, congressional Democrats denounced the White House after administration officials acknowledged this week that e-mails dealing with official government business, including the firing of U.S. attorneys, may have been lost because they were improperly sent through political messaging accounts. Twenty-two White House officials -- and a total of about 50 over the course of the administration -- have been given such accounts to avoid doing political work on government equipment.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, accused the White House of lying about the matter. He was joined by the ranking Republican on the committee, Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.), in calling on the White House to join Congress in setting up a "fair and objective process for investigating this matter."

"You can't erase e-mails, not today," Leahy said in an angry speech on the Senate floor. "They've gone through too many servers. Those e-mails are there -- they just don't want to produce them. It's like the infamous 18-minute gap in the Nixon White House tapes."

White House officials rejected that explanation. "What we have done has been forthcoming, honest," spokeswoman Dana Perino said. "We are trying to understand to the best of our ability the universe of the e-mails that were potentially lost, and we are taking steps to make sure that we use the forensics that are available to retrieve any of those that are lost."

The disclosures came as White House counsel Fred F. Fielding rejected demands for a compromise on providing testimony and records to Congress related to the prosecutor firings. In a letter to the heads of the House and Senate Judiciary committees, Fielding said the White House is standing firm with its "unified offer," which would include providing a limited set of documents. The White House has proposed allowing Rove and other aides to be interviewed privately, without a transcript and not under oath.

Fielding also wrote that it "remains our intention to collect e-mails and documents" from the RNC and other outside accounts used by White House officials. The Senate Judiciary Committee approved, but did not issue, new subpoenas for the Justice Department yesterday.

Gonzales, meanwhile, has been preparing for a pivotal appearance on Tuesday before the committee, including mock testimony sessions lasting up to five hours a day, officials said.

E-mails from Rove and other White House officials potentially figure in a number of congressional investigations. Democrats are seeking the RNC e-mails as part of an effort to determine the extent of Rove's role in firing the U.S. attorneys and the alleged politicization at the General Services Administration.

The RNC yesterday turned over to the White House a copy of e-mail records for administration officials still on the RNC server to determine whether any of them are privileged or whether they can be provided to congressional investigators. Officials indicated that they would include post-2005 e-mails from Rove.

GOP officials said they are also trying to determine whether they can recover other e-mail that may have been deleted through regular purges of e-mails or by deliberate deletion by White House staff. Waxman said the RNC indicated that it had destroyed all e-mail records from White House officials in 2001, 2002 and 2003.

In 2004, the RNC exempted White House officials from its policy of purging all e-mail after 30 days, so any lost e-mail after that date would have been presumably deleted by a White House official.

"We do not know what exists pre-2005 -- we are in the process of trying to determine what, if anything, does," RNC spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt said. Another GOP official familiar with the inner workings of the RNC said officials have no evidence that Rove had deliberately deleted any e-mail. Kelner referred calls to the RNC, and the White House said Rove was not available to comment.

Republican officials also said there was nothing nefarious in their decision to take precautions to preserve Rove's e-mail. According to Waxman, Kelner told his staff that the RNC commenced a program in 2005 that took away Rove's ability to personally delete his e-mails. GOP officials said that was done only to preserve records for possible use in legal settings, not out of any concern that Rove would seek to scrub his e-mail account.

Erasing an e-mail message beyond hope of retrieval is not easy, experts said.

In general, deleting any file on a computer does not make it go away, because the computer normally will erase not the file but rather its own records of it. "The data is not gone until it is overwritten," said John Christopher, senior data-recovery engineer at Novato, Calif.-based DriveSavers. The "deleted" file will remain on the hard drive, where it can still be found and read until other data are saved to the same spot.

The same thing happens with e-mail: Trashing a message only means that the mail program clears its records of where it had filed that e-mail in its own database.

Paul Robichaux, a principal with the Redmond, Wash., technology services firm 3Sharp and the author of three books about Microsoft's e-mail software, compared it to a library that removes the entry for a book from its card catalogue: "The book is still on the shelf."
----------------------------------------
Staff writers Dan Eggen and Rob Pegoraro and washingtonpost.com staff writer Paul Kane contributed to this report.

I went to a seminar recently where a forensic accountant talked about the process of recovering emails during an investigation.

Amazing how many copies of an email exist once you've sent it - your hard-drive, your server, the servers it travelled through, any tech device (blackberry etc) that you might have copied your email to, the server it was sent to, the hard-drive of the recipient - the hard-drive of anyone who was copied by the recipient (and the servers it travelled through).

S'hard to get rid of the buggers. They leave many many footprints.

The emails aren't gone. No way. Not unless a significant and pervasive effort to erase them went on. Which is damning in itself.

Note that the redaction done in todays' doc dump wasn't complete; you can read some of the stuff they meant to white out. Great work, fellas.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/4/13/122213/937

Cycloptichorn

Report: US Attorney replacements were picked prior to firings Mike Sheehan
Published: Friday April 13, 2007

Replacements for several of the fired U.S. Attorneys were picked prior to their dismissals, with the White House identifying Bush insiders for the positions, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

"The Justice Department identified five Bush administration insiders as replacement U.S. attorneys almost a year before most of the prosecutors were fired," writes Dan Eggen for the Post, "contrary to repeated claims that no such list had ever been drawn up."

Eggen reports that Kyle Sampson, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' then chief of staff, sent emails to the White House in early 2006 that listed possible replacements for attorneys in regions such as California's Southern District and the Eastern District of Arkansas.

"The replacements on the list were all high-level administration insiders, including two who have gone on to different U.S. attorney postings," says Eggen, naming the two as Jeff Taylor (District of Columbia) and Deborah Rhodes (Alabama).

Officials in the Justice Department have previously indicated that only one U.S. Attorney, Tim Griffin (Little Rock), was identified specifically as a possible replacement candidate for the fired lawyers, Eggen writes.

RAW STORY reported earlier that Sampson, in an email contained in the Justice documents release, expressed his belief that he and his staffers could ward off a major investigation into the Attorney firings by "talking some sense" into Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

Watchdog to Fitzgerald: Re-open Plame investigation in light of Rove's 'missing' emails link

Hear, hear!!!! But Fitz is a wimp, and is now in the process of slinking away.

Tell me,does anyone agree with this statement...



The reason I asked is because the Clintons used that defense when they were questioned about their missing e-mails in 2000.

Here is the whole article...

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment032400a.html

Now,since nobody on here that I know of on the left considered missing e-mails a big deal then,why is it such a big deal now?

Heres another report...
http://www.judicialwatch.org/archive/2000/786.shtml

So,while I am not excusing or defending the WH about the missing e-mails,I am wondering why those of you on the left didnt seem to mind when the Clinton WH tried to pull the same thing.

MM, if you are not excusing the Bush WH, why are you bringing this up? Two wrongs don't make a right.

You didnt read my post,or you didnt understand it.

I am simply asking why many of you on the left didnt seem to mind when Clnton "lost" e-mails and used the defense I posted.
But,now you seem to think it IS a big deal when the Bush admin "lost" some e-mails.

I am simply wondering why the change of heart?
Why is it a big deal now,if it wasnt then?

No, the Clinton WH didn't pull the same thing. The missing emails are not on the WH servers in this case. When emails go missing on a given system the server that backs up every computer will still have them because all the emails were routed through the email server on that system. Anyone with a little technical knowledge would understand those emails are not lost, it will just take some time to find them. It is a tedious process to find them but they can be found. You only need to reinstall the backups for that time period on a seperate system to find them. It costs time and money but no worries about them being there unless the backups were done improperly.

The missing emails in this case were sent on a system specifically designed to avoid the WH servers. There is no central server known to back up those machines. There is not a specific central email server that all the messages go through.

In the Clinton case what happened was obviously technical error. The system designed to backup the emails was faulty. The error was on the IT side of the equation. The system designed to back up the computers did work.

This is NOT a case of emails didn't get backed up as designed. This is a case of there was NEVER a design to back them up.

In the Clinton case the emailers didn't know the system wasn't backing up the emails. In this Bush case, the emailers KNOW the emails are not being backed up by the WH because they KNOW the system is seperate from the WH.

Will the emails be found? Probably. Will they contain sensitive information that should have been sent on WH computers? We won't know until they find the emails.

You often make this argument, MM. The fact is that you have no idea what any of "us on the left" minded or said about the situation in 2000 because none of us were not here on A2K talking about it. You're trying to call hypocrisy without having any clue what any of us thought/think about that situation. So let's turn it around then. Did you agree with the obsessive investigations of the Clintons? If so, don't you think that turnabout is fair play?

No,I did NOT agree with the investigations concerning the Clintons,and I have said so publicly on here and other forums.

Please name some of the many of us on the left who didn't mind.

Joe(we smoke too much grass to remember)Nation

I wonder if you agreed with this investigation MM?



http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4155/is_20000324/ai_n13849722

Since everything should be equal, when will the DoJ open its criminal investigation into the Bush WH missing emails?