Quick! Hide the loot!

A little news item culled from my handy Google alert feature caught my eye.

Apparently Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel who indicted the Vice President's right hand man, and who continues to investigate the outing of Valerie Plame, is having trouble finding some White House emails.

In true legal fashion he doesn't jump to any conclusions. He assumes the most benign forces are responsible:

---

"The special counsel investigating the leak of a CIA officer's identity says there could be a problem with White House e-mail records. Patrick Fitzgerald is raising the possibility that records could be missing because of an archiving problem at the White House."

Just because the counselor, who appears to be built of integrity, isn't able to speculate publicly, doesn't mean that we can't. I'm just wondering if these missing emails have anything whatever to do with this:

On Friday, Sept. 26, 2003, the CIA directed the Justice Department to launch a criminal probe into the leak. Three days later, on Monday, Sept. 29, 2003, the WH counsel's office was formally notified about the investigation. And then 12 hours after that, Gonzales told White House staff to preserve materials. In other words, the amount of time Bush aides were given to, perhaps, discard and destroy relevant evidence after the DoJ began its work wasn't just 12 hours; it was several days.

Unfortunately, according to the letter Fitzgerald recently sent: "not all e-mail was archived in 2003, the year someone in the Bush administration exposed the identity of Valerie Plame."

Shame.