Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which sued the Bush White House over millions of missing White House emails, has released a treasure trove of documents relating to the loss of the emails. We’re just beginning to go through them, but CREW says the headline item is that the documents seem to confirm that emails subpoenaed by Patrick Fitzgerald regarding the leak of Valerie Plame’s CIA identiy were among those missing from Dick Cheney’s office.
Update: You can find the documents here.
Update 2: I just spoke to Anne Weisman, CREW’s chief counsel. She says these documents, are just the beginning, and CREW both wants and expects to receive more from the Obama White House. This set of documents was originally provided to Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) by the Bush administration when Waxman began investigating the missing White House emails case, so they just represent what the Bush administration was willing to release (albeit to a Congressman, not the public) about its own failings. Obviously there’s much more—Weisman says this is only a “very small percentage” of the material CREW needs to understand exactly how the White House could lose several million emails.
Weisman says that these new documents do little to allay her concern about the timing of certain gaps in the email archives of the Office of the Vice President (OVP). “I find it incredible that then-WH counsel Alberto Gonzales gets a call from DOJ saying they’re opening this investigation and everything has to be preserved, and then the days immediately following that [call] there are OVP emails missing,” she says. Maybe Gonzales forgot that he was supposed to make sure everything was preserved?
