What ever happened to those 5 million missing Bush White House emails anyway?
by digby
My Salon piece today is about the latest right wing hysteria comparing the missing Lois Lerner IRS emails to Nixon’s 18 minute gap. The wingnuts have a very selective memory about missing emails and erased tapes. You don’t have to go back 40 years …
It’s also interesting how soon these conservative commentators forget a more recent “missing email” scandal. Remember that time when the Bush White House couldn’t provide years worth of emails from the office of the President and Vice President involving Scooter Libby and kept it secret for years until it was finally forced to admit that the emails were destroyed and they hadn’t kept a back-up? Apparently Krauthamer and company forgot about that. (You’d think his colleague at Fox would remind him — she was the presidential press secretary at the time and the official who finally admitted publicly that they didn’t have the missing emails.) They also forgot about that time when the Bush administration couldn’t turn over emails in the US Attorney scandal because they had failed to follow the law and conduct government business on government email servers and had instead used private RNC email addresses.
And then there was this:
A videotape showing Pentagon officials’ final interrogation of al-Qaeda suspect Jose Padilla is missing, raising questions about whether federal prosecutors have lost other recordings and evidence in the case…
Prosecutors and the Pentagon have said they cannot find the tape despite an intensive search.
But hey, that’s nothing to the horror of a Tea Partier having to fill out some extra tax forms.
Meanwhile, as the right fulminates over some missing IRS emails, it’s clear that nobody is concerned about this:
At the time that the Central Intelligence Agency destroyed videotapes of the interrogations of operatives of Al Qaeda, a federal judge was still seeking information from Bush administration lawyers about the interrogation of one of those operatives, Abu Zubaydah, according to court documents made public on Wednesday.
The court documents, filed in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, appear to contradict a statement last December by Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, that when the tapes were destroyed in November 2005 they had no relevance to any court proceeding, including Mr. Moussaoui’s criminal trial.