Fox News In Charge of the Henhouse

FOX NEWS IN CHARGE OF THE HENHOUSE

By Eric Malone

This is Your Country.

This is Your Country’s Shadow Government on Drugs.

Last week we found out that there are Five Million E-mails missing from the White House (from March 2003 to October 2005), some of them involving the case of the Eight Fired U.S. Attorneys about which Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will testify on Tuesday.  Then Department of Justice (DOJ) Spokesliar Dana Perino came out to explain that this is the “first administration to operate in the era of instant communications.”

Gee, really?  I could have sworn that Oliver North and Richard Secord got caught with their hands in the Iran-Contra cookie jar when they thought they had deleted incriminating emails from the IBM PROFS system, only to have them turn up on the servers in the basement of the White House back in 1987.

And this is not the first time that Señor Torture has had “email troubles.”  When Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald went looking for Karl Rove emails on the Valerie Plame CIA leak, he issued a subpoena to then-White House counsel Gonzales on January 22, 2004.  Thoughtful Alberto gave everyone at the White House 12-hours notice to clean out their hard drives and purge their servers before delivering the subpoena.

And this is the guy who is in charge of making sure Justice is served?

Federal law (the Presidential Records Act) requires that all official White House communications must be archived and preserved.  If they are deleted, that’s right, it’s a felony crime. Even if you work for the cops at DOJ.

And if you are using a *private* email account for official business, well, guess what?  That’s illegal too, and it appears that’s exactly what happened here.  Karl Rove, Jack Abramoff, and Alberto Gonzales were figuring out how to get lawyers who would prosecute Democrats right before the election (and exonerate Republicans) and they were doing it on domain names like gwb43.com and rnchq.org (Republican National Committee Headquarters).  The CREW Report on Friday makes it clear that the folks in the Oval Office have “willfully dismantled” the email archiving system put in place by the Clinton Administration.

Why?  So their nasty little notes about breaking the law couldn’t be traced and could easily be erased.

One bright spot:  Since the missing emails were not on official White House servers (we’re told), that means that the felons cannot hide behind the skirt of “Executive Privilege.”  When Senator Patrick Leahy offered the assistance of “a teenage kid in my neighborhood” who could go find the lost data, Perino snapped back: “I didn’t know Senator Leahy is also an IT expert.” Meee-ow!

So far, the mercenary oil merchants running our country have turned over some 3000 pages of documents to the Senate Judiciary Committee.  And they were “selective, incomplete, and highly redacted.”  (Blacked out with a Magic Marker.)  Oh, and get this:

The White House says that it may not be able to comply with turning over all the documents requested due to “privacy issues.”

Well.

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