Who Is Behind The 4 Years Of "Missing" Karl Rove Emails?

Related:
- Rove E-Mail Sought by Congress May Be Missing
- Missing E-Mail May Be Related to Prosecutors
- Deleting embarrassing e-mails isn't easy, experts say
- Impudent Bush : I will oppose any attempts to subpoena

I don't want to hear that five million emails were lost. I don't want to hear that four years of Karl Rove's emails have magically disappeared from the face of the earth.

I don't want to hear that the five million missing emails and the recent attorney purge are unrelated. I don't want to hear it because I simply don't believe it.

If the emails are missing, it is only because someone doesn't want the emails to be found.

There are also questions being raised about White House use of GOP-provided, nongovernmental email accounts to avoid complying with Federal law, which requires the preservation of all electronic communications sent or received by White House staff .

The White House and The Republican National Committee are being investigated by The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, who are trying to determine if the missing emails are connected to the attorney purge.

Robert Luskin, Rove's lawyer is claiming that Rove believed that his emails were being stored on other machines and that he did not intentionally delete emails.

But Democrats aren't buying the explanations, and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Senator Patrick Leahy stated to following on the Senate floor of the missing emails :

"You can't erase e-mails, not today," ... "They've gone through too many servers. Those e-mails are there -- they just don't want to produce them. It's like the infamous 18-minute gap in the Nixon White House tapes."

Leahy is more right than wrong, McClatchy reports that :

"If Karl Rove or other White House staffers tried to delete sensitive e-mails from their computers, experts said, investigators usually could recover all or most of them."
...
It's like "removing an index card in a library," said Robert Guinaugh, a senior partner at CyberControls LLC, a data forensic-support company in Barrington, Ill. "You take the card out, but the book is still on the shelf."
...
"People think they can delete e-mails, but that's not always the case," Guinaugh said.
...
As an investigator works, he may run across evidence that someone had installed scrubbing software or changed the date and time that a file was created.

"That would be suspicious," Guinaugh said. "It might indicate that something nefarious was going on."

First the White House claimed the attorney purge was not politically related but performance related.

Closer inspection has proven that performance was not the basis of the firing of eight U.S. Attorney's, political loyalty was.

The attorney's were rated to determine whether or not they were, using Karl Rove's own words "loyal Bushies".

To the White House, US Attorney allegiance to the Republican Party and to George W. Bush was (and is) far more important than any allegiance to United States law.

Now the White House is claiming that the reason Rove & Co. used RNC email accounts instead of White House email accounts was because they were politically related emails.

Politically related emails that are now magically missing. Four years of them. Five million of them.

Are we are really supposed to believe these missing politically related emails sent threw the RNC to avoid federal law on White House record keeping are not related to the politically related firing of eight US Attorneys that the White House claims is not politically motivated?

Do they really expect intelligent people to swallow that pill using the poisoned Kool-Aid they have so artfully provided for us?

My intuition and skepticism are telling me the emails have gone missing because someone wanted those emails missing.

Furthermore, I am willing to bet there is much more in those missing emails than just the information about the attorney purge.

Given that the five million missing emails are pre-2005 there is likely to be other important emails in the batch besides emails regarding the attorney purge. This could include emails regarding the invasion of Iraq and the leaking of CIA operative Valerie Plame's name to the press - all more good reasons to try to make the information disappear.

In the days and weeks to come more information will become available, and I doubt any of it is going to indicate that the Bush Administration is a pious and effective Administration.

As the pressure builds it is likely that the White House and it's loyalist will continue to lash out, just like many cornered animals will do. Their anger and refusal to fully cooperate (while claiming to cooperate) only makes them look more guilty to average Americans.

Everyday this scandal gets bigger and more complicated.

More and more comparisons are being made between the missing emails and the 18 1/2-minute gap in the Richard Nixon audio tapes about the Watergate break-in.

[Fact: Did you know Karl Rove worked on the Richard Nixon reelection campaign? Vice President Dick Cheney first served as a Nixon intern and then served under former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who served in various positions under Nixon. Many people who work for Bush once worked for Nixon. That's not very surprising, is it?]

Hopefully the emails can be recovered even if the cronies went to great lengths to hide or destroy them.