Email missing from Cheney's office on day White House told to preserve documents in CIA leak
Nick Juliano
Published: Monday January 21, 2008
Emails gone on day Bush said he'd 'take care of' leaker
Ironically, Cheney's office is missing emails from the very day President Bush told reporters he'd "take care of" whatever staff member had actually leaked the CIA agent's name.New report shows archives gone on several key days in Plame investigation
Among the sixteen days for which email are missing from Vice President Cheney's office is Sept. 30, 2003, the same day the day the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced they were investigating who outed former CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson.
That morning, then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales ordered the president and the vice president's staff to "preserve all materials that might be relevant" to an inchoate Justice Department probe.
"We were informed last evening by the Department of Justice that it has opened an investigation into possible unauthorized disclosures concerning the identity of an undercover CIA employee," Gonzales wrote in a terse Sep. 30, 2003 email. "The Department advised us that it will be sending a letter today instructing us to preserve all materials that might be relevant to its investigation. Its letter will provide more specific instructions on the materials in which it is interested, and we will communicate those instructions directly to you. In the meantime, you must preserve all materials that might in any way be related to the Department's investigation."
The analysis was released over the weekend by Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW), a D.C.-based ethics watchdog.
The White House said in a court filing last week that backup tapes, which contained archived copies of the e-mails, were recycled as part of a policy the White House had in place until October 2003.
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