Earlier this month, the New York Daily News reported an interesting tidbit about Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into the Plame leak. The paper noted that Fitzgerald “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.”
What’s more, Fitzgerald’s letter said that “not all email of the Office of Vice President and the Executive Office of President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system.”
Last night, however, the AP reported that the missing emails have suddenly surfaced.
The defense was told that the White House had recently located and turned over about 250 pages of e-mails from the vice president’s office. Fitzgerald, in a letter last month to the defense, had cautioned Libby’s lawyers that some e-mails might be missing because the White House’s archiving system had failed.
I haven’t seen any real follow up yet, but this seems like a development that warrants a little more explanation. In September 2003, White House staff was ordered to preserve materials related to Fitzgerald’s investigation. More than two years later, Fitzgerald finds that a whole lot of emails that were supposed to have been archived are missing. More recently, the White House “located” over 250 pages of emails?
Maybe there’s a reasonable explanation. Just as importantly, maybe the emails themselves aren’t damaging or even relevant to the investigation at all. But one need not be a skeptic to at least wonder where these emails disappeared to and how, exactly, they were recently discovered.
And, for that matter, did this story have to break late on a Friday afternoon?