White House Must Answer For Missing Emails

Lucas123 writes "A District Court judge this week ruled in favor of a Washington-based watchdog group, allowing them to question White House officials about missing emails involving controversial issues. The subjects include the release of the identity of a former CIA operative, the reasons for launching the war in Iraq and actions by the US Department of Justice. The group had filed suit [PDF] last May against the White House Office of Administration, seeking access to White House email under the federal Freedom of Information Act. The discovery ruling is bringing to light issues of email retention in businesses and other private organizations. We've previously discussed the White House's difficulties with email."

Comments

Re:How will they enforce it?

[jollyreaper]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGpWtTJmfvY

Ah, here it is. We don't torture, never tortured, oh wait, we tortured three people. So now will we investigate? No. Fucker.

Re:How will they appeal it?

[Harmonious Botch]

Why prosecute when a SCOTUS justice indicates that he would reverse on appeal?

US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Tuesday defended the use of harsh physical interrogation techniques, saying in an interview with Law in Action on BBC Radio 4 that they may be justified to deter an immediate threat. Scalia argued that "so-called torture" may not necessarily be prohibited by the US constitution, as he said the Eighth Amendment bar against "cruel and unusual punishment" was only intended to apply to criminal punishments:

Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to find out where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited under the Constitution? Because smacking someone in the face would violate the Eighth Amendment in a prison context. You can't go around smacking people about. Is it obvious that what can't be done for punishment can't be done to exact information that is crucial to this society? It's not at all an easy question, to tell you the truth. Just to mollify shoot-the-messenge moderators, I favor impeaching Scalia for this.

Re:Expected answer

[Zollui]

There's a government mechanism for dealing with such matters which people here might find surprising.

In fulfilment of a legal obligation. a request will be made to administrators and office staff to check their email accounts for the 'missing email'. The managers will accept the word of the staff under them, who will typically eyeball their inbox in Outlook before reporting 'no, haven't got it'.

Don't assume they're grepping through their servers because if they're just responding to a freedom of information request, they're not. They will restrict themselves to a search that seems 'reasonable' in the eyes of a technological illiterate, that's all.

Well...

[jwietelmann]

If you believe Greg Palast, those emails aren't so lost after all. His claim is that Rove and company messed up and accidentally sent a bunch of those emails to http://georgewbush.org/ addresses instead of http://georgewbush.com/. If these emails are genuine, they detail, among other things, how Republican operatives used a practice called caging to suppress probable opposition voters.

Of course given the nature of email, it's probably not provable that the email is genuine. And it doesn't help that Palast has a bit of a muckraker reputation. From what I've seen, he does have a bit of a bias, but I've never known him to fabricate his evidence. Personally I'm inclined to believe the emails are real, but, like I said, I'm not sure you can prove that. Unless of course they also turn up in the White House archives.

Oh, right. Nevermind.