The White House said today that it might be missing e-mails relating to the firing of eight United States attorneys, as lawmakers on Capitol Hill gave themselves the authority to subpoena more government documents and testimony linked to the controversy.
“It can’t be ruled out,” Scott Stanzel, the deputy White House press secretary, told reporters this morning when asked if some of the missing e-mails included those related to the dismissals.
At what point did the Oval Office begin to resemble the backroom at the Bada Bing?
cleek
when can we start the impeachment hearings?
Perry Como
Pass the popcorn.
Bubblegum Tate
January, 2001
Cromagnon
They apparently deleted 5 million emails
Cromagnon
Here’s the link… (Sorry the link tags don’t seem to be working)
http://www.citizensforethics.org/node/27603
Cromagnon
Well I guess they are
ThymeZone
However, your link doesn’t appear to work.
jenniebee
I am shocked – *shocked* – to find that there are shenanigans going on here.
Tulkinghorn
You can’t lose emails. You can go in and scrub all the servers, all the laptops and blackberries, and dump the NSA intercept records. There is no ‘oops’, though.
Conspiracy to obstruct justice? A conspiracy involving scores of political operatives and technicians? Good luck pulling that off, guys. No way some IT guy did not go out the door with a few cd-roms in his back pocket.
So, will they try to block a special prosecutor now?
Dreggas
Ok OT but just had to share this
Zombie Santa Claus
Why don’t we hear anything about all the emails they didn’t lose?
Cyrus
In college, while I was a news editor of the campus paper, the editor-in-chief of the paper had been one of the the news editors before me. So while I was just getting used to handling irate and half-coherent e-mails, he was the guy I went to. He said that when he wanted to say “fuck you” to someone, but couldn’t for obvious reasons, his response was “thank you for your comments.” Try it some time, it really works!
John Cole
Thank you for your comments.
Jake
It also can’t be ruled out that a lot of people are still ear deep in the shit and sinking like stones. Remember, I. Scoot A Librul didn’t go down for leaking Plame’s name.
In a related vein it looks like Paul Wolftitz won’t go down for being a prick. Just thinking with it.
How many scandals does this make for this month?
Jill
Missing emails from the USA purge, missing tapes from Jose Padilla’s interogation, missing information explaining gaps in GWB’s Texa Air Nat’l Guard records…
Jill
…or should I say “missing”.
Dreggas
Thus Speaketh Leahy regarding lost emails:
Dreggas
Bruce posted this on the “OOPS” thread…
Oh sweet…sweet justice…
Pb
It can’t be ruled out.
Thank you for your comments.
Tulkinghorn
Time to reconvene that grand jury…
Mike S
If only they were related to blowjobs. Then the Republicans in congress would be demanding a special prosecutor. As it is I’m sure that Hatch will find a way to bring out his own “Presidential kneepads” and defend yet another example of actual wrongdoing.
tBone
Blowjobs are a threat to the moral dignity and security of our great nation. Deleted emails that might happen to be incriminating? Well, those are just an administrative oversight. Nothing to get worked up over unless you’re a frothing BDS-afflicted moonbat.
Jake
For gods’ sake, no one tell Foley.
Punchy
Suddenly, I look forward to my alarm clock. Up, shower, deoderant, brush my grill, and check here and TPM for the latest daily scandal. After years and years of being labeled conspiracy theorists, the most ridiculous is looking like the most likely with these jokers.
Comeuppance is a bitch, aint it Paul and Darrell?
Pb
Amateurs–where’s Abramoff when you need him? Not to mention these guys…
Jill
Raise your hand if you think excuses Scott Stanzel is giving about the “lost” emails will change by next week! Today it’s avoiding violating the Hatch Amendment tomorrow…
Dreggas
Someone over on TPM Muckraker brought up a good point with regard to the backdoor appointment of a new archivist that was shady at best as well. Nope nothing to see here.
Dreggas
Oh boy
Rome Again
I got an explanation for ya, they were INCRIMINATING!
Mike S
Would it surprise anyone to hear that the cultists over at Redstate are defending the White House?
Didn’t think so.
Dreggas
And all that rampant voter fraud we hear about
Baby Jane
Blah Blah Blah: gop run on servers located in a secure server room and locked in a rack
Jake
Nice to know I’m not the only one who chuckles in anticipation when turning on the PC for the day.
Man, what are we going to do when we have an Admin. that is only sort of crooked?
BTW: For a moment I thought you were stricken with an obsessive/compulsive disorder that caused you to clean your out-door cooking device every morning. [/geek]
Jill
When Fitzgerald gave Gonzales (WH counsel @ the time)the word to retain all emails regarding WH communications there was a delay of about 12 hours from when he was told and when he let the chief of staff (Andy Card) know. At the time us crazy liberals said something was amiss about the delay and I guess we were right…once again.
Richard 23
Off topic, but breaking news:
This is at the top of CNN’s website.
Jill
Cnn should follow CBS and fire Glenn Beck.
Dreggas
Can rush be added to the list along with Hannity and the rest of the nuts?
Zifnab
Hey, if you can find the emails they didn’t lose, I’m confident there’s a Democratic head of the Judiciary Committee who would love to have a word with you.
Beck should follow Imus and start wearing a cowboy hat. That would be quality TV.
Baby Jane
I ran a whois search on a few of the GOP sites that came up in the Google search I previously posted and they are all hosted at SmartTechCorp. I think SmartTechCorp needs a visit.
John D.
Well, they *may* be hosted at SmartTech, or they could simply be providing the bandwidth. You can’t tell from a WHOIS — if that were the case, my company would be hosted by BellSouth when in reality they simply “own” the IP I lease from them.
Baby Jane
Yes, but considering that they are all “run on servers located in a secure server room and locked in a rack”, I’ll go with hosted.
Also: it should be followed up, regardless.
Kirk Spencer
They’re hosted at SmarTech. Seriously, there were several articles in the local paper (Chattanooga Times-Free Press) during the last presidential election cycle about how the company was “hosting the GOP Convention.”
And the company is seriously good, tech-wise. Which makes this disappearing emails crap even more suspicious.
Seriously good? Let’s start with the server location. The company (and its several sister companies) own what used to be a bank in downtown Chattanooga. The server farm is in the vault. There’s a major fiber and backbone nexus very close to the bank as well – the other reason it was chosen. The company’s techs teach seminars locally as well, and while I’m far from expert I’m good enough to sort most BS artists from real techs, and most of SmarTech’s seminar people are the latter.
I’m anticipating a spotlight on Chattanooga within the next few weeks for pretty much this reason alone. I suspect there’ll be lots of spinoff stories. Such as — a major patron for the company in the days it went from basic ISP to major player was the then-mayor of Chattanooga, now Senator Corker. There may be no story. OTOH, it will get examined.
Baby Jane
I spelled the name wrong. It’s SmarTech, as Kirk wrote above, not SmartTech, as I previously wrote.
Teak111
Hey Karl, emails just don’t jump from your black berry to the RNC server. IOWs, scrubbing your BB and the RNC server ain’t enough. Your emials bounce from server to server, to repeater, to backback bones, to network hubs, etc. Each location generally has a record if not the entire email. To truely scrub your emails, Karl, you would have to trace the path of each email and scub each location. Pretty hard to do. I’m laying odds that his lost email will be posted in the web very soon. Enterprizing hackers live for this type of challenge. Now that I think of it, can you scub a BB. Maybe the dems ought to supena Rove’s BB;)
Dreggas
Yep, that will be the modern equivalent of Deepthroat, probably spelled D33pThr()at or in some other manner of Elite speak. The irony would be if the person who managed to get the info did indeed use that moniker.
Kirk Spencer
Please, Dreggas, spell it right (grin). Either d33p7hr047 (leet) or [)33|*+|-||[email protected]+ (ultraleet).
Punchy
Uh…impossible to do without earning yourself some Obstruction of Justice or RICO charges. Therein lies the rub–they can only scrub enough to make it look like an accident. Any additional or outrageous scrubbing must be intentional, and easily exposed.
qwerty42
This looks less like a carefully organized operation than an act of desperation. Maybe they have been carefully destroying email for some time, but I’d guess anyone involved would want as few as possible to know about what was going on. Someone (senior) in their IT group would have to know, but probably as few within that group as possible (though it seems likely the others would be able to put it together); of course how large their shop might be I couldn’t say. Some other senior staffers and various officials. Wow. It looks like “obstruction of justice” and several other crimes at the very heart of the party structure. This has got to be humiliating and painful for many Republicans in Washington and elsewhere. They’ve generally been loyal to the President so far – are they nearing the breaking point?
Rome Again
I wonder what the whistleblower policy is at SmarTech.
Rome Again
It seems to me much of the last six years has been an act of desperation.
Dreggas
I’m too damn lazy to go through it, I was actually looking for the ultra elite form but can’t remember my ascii from my ansii anymore. Oh for the days of social engineering, dumpster diving behind tech stores, large quantities of surge and the ability to remain awake all night looking at the green and black screen of telnet. (Yes I even customized mine to match the computer screen from Alien, especially playing on an Alien Vs Predator MUD.)
ThymeZone
Can you believe these fucking people?
Davebo
Teak111
You are a bit confused. Sure, emails bounce between smtp servers, gateways, routers all over the place.
But they are only stored on the sending server and receiving server. I’m betting an Exchange environment here, but don’t these guys back up their exchange servers?
Dreggas
The really shitty part for them is that, at least in the tech sector out here in CA the majority of us are all Liberals (not of the hippy variety) or libertarians (who are incensed as well). I had the opportunity to do some networking (of the social variety) at a fetish ball I was DJing this past weekend, most of the rivet heads and counter culture people were all techies and were all libs LOL. They’d jump at the chance to tear these guys full of holes on their own ground (ie tech stuff).
Sirkowski
There were no male prostitutes in the backroom of the Bada Bing.
Kirk Spencer
I’m going to strongly recommend everyone read this letter from Congressman Waxman (warning, pdf file). While TPMuckraker pointed out some key paragraphs, I want to emphasize…
The RNC quit auto-deleting every 30 days in 2004. In 2005 they added a SPECIAL archiving for Karl Rove’s account because he kept deleting the stuff anyway – said archive is untouchable by white house staff. This last month they went ahead and removed all white house staff access to the server delete capability.
While there are a lot of questions and thoughts that come to mind from this, here are the two biggest IMO:
1) Everything Karl Rove wrote and received in regard to the USA matter is still there. Special archive, remember?
2) Even after a “you will preserve” order (due to the Plame investigation) Karl Rove regularly deleted his email FROM THE SERVER.
2 gives probable cause to justify a warrant for access to 1.
Dreggas
It’s most likely Exchange given just the formatting and display style of emails. Exchange itself prompts people to archive stuff all the time and if the tech company hosting all this is outside of the RNC itself then there is a decent chance the archives exist unless there was a standing agreement in the contract to destroy stuff after a certain amount of time. What I am wondering is how KKKarl got the permissions to delete stuff from the server.
Of course this does not mean it is gone, it’s just not in the file system any longer, and of course things can be recovered on your computer from a long long time ago.
Baby Jane
I’ve never heard of trustme.com before, so I don’t know it’s veracity, but this is an interesting read.
Dreggas
again O/T but I think my outrage meter just went to 11…
See here
demimondian
Back in the day, I used to work with the Exchange team. I’m inclined to suspect that the server is E2K3 — and, God willing, it’s hardened to secure standards. (Although, for all I know, it’s not. I’m going to hope that their admins are as professional as most email admins are these days.) If so, then, yes, getting rid of deleted items is harder than people tend to realize — how frequently is the garbageman coming through? How much storage pressure is the store under? What QOS disaster recovery agreement did the RNC have with its contract provider? What about data recovery?
We’ll see — but Exchange is built to make it hard for people to irretrievably delete emails by accident. One of the not-entirely-unpredictable side effects of that design is that it is also hard for them to irretrievably delete emails intentionally, either.
ThymeZone
Please send for my booklet, “The Guru’s Guide to Exchange Internals — How to Commit Treason Using Email Dirty Tricks”, just $199.95 plus S&H.
Forward by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.
(Republican Corrupt Tech Press — (c)2002 )
{ add to cart }
demimondian
TZ — Your ideas are interesting. I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Rome Again
LMAO ~ WOW!
D. Mason
No but you can take out the battery and throw them in the trash compactor once a month while retaining contacts and other settings on the sim card. That is if you can afford to pay for the phones at $500 a pop… I wonder.
Tulkinghorn
And I take it that it is impossible to intentionally delete emails while making it look like an accident, or to delete them without there being a clear record of who deleted them, and when?
There is always the obstruction of justice angle to this, and maybe a few cd-roms were copied by an astute techie who wanted to keep out of trouble…
ThymeZone
I forget which megacybershop you work for. Is it Bill’s Place? Have him give me a call :)
demimondian
Impossible? Nothing’s impossible, you know that. It’s going to be difficult.
Dreggas
Being a software geek I am not sure how the server admin stuff works, however I do know that very few people would be on the list giving them access to the server in order to delete emails server side, as a result that short list narrows things down quite a bit. If turd-burglars name is on that list it only makes things more suspicious. The servers would maintain access records of who logged in when so there are a few more pieces to the puzzle.
With all the fallout from Enron and the general fear of hackers and identity thieves most setups, unless they are run out of a garage, are hardened against infiltration and malicious use. Of course that is unless there is something in the contract with the RNC to allow white house officials access to do this kind of stuff. Even then there are accounts with user names and passwords and myriad other ways to look into who was doing what.
Of course the amusing collateral damage would be whatever else was on those servers with regard to communications being inadvertantly leaked….
Dreggas
Conyers and Sanchez called the bluff. Either the RNC produces or they’ll get their own cyber-forensics people to work with RNC personnel to do data recovery.
ThymeZone
You’d have to find a computer guy who would be an accomplice to what looks like …. criminal activity.
{voice of Hank Hill } you couldn’t pay me enough to get involved in something like that. Do you suppose RNC has shady geek types working for them?
Dreggas
depends. It sounds like the RNC used a 3rd party host and that they, themselves, don’t have an internal IT outfit. But anything is possible.
demimondian
They have this guy named…Rove. Karl Rove. Does he count?
qwerty42
Exactly. Even if involved, I do not see them going to the wall for the party or the administration; this isn’t a special ops group; they are sysadmins and/or mail admins. “Go to prison” was not likely in the job description.
Dreggas
That is offensive to geeks everywhere.
pharniel
This is a computer crime, so it’s “GO to PRison and never use a computer or the internet ever again” if hit under the ‘hacking’ statute.