Pictures... what pictures?

Josh Marshall has confirmed that someone is going to great lengths to get rid of photographic evidence that Jack Abramofff & George W. Bush were pretty tight. Move along, move along... nothing to see here, nothing to see... anymore :-)

In his press conference today, President Bush suggested that the existence of photographs of himself and Jack Abramoff are no big deal and generally pooh-poohed the press's focus on the story. But our reporting suggests that the White House is actively involved in covering up and possibly destroying photographic evidence of the two men together.

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So, here we have it that the president of Reflections admits that she removed photos of Abramoff and the president from their online database. If what her employee told me on the 11th is accurate the photos were also deleted from the CDs they keep on file in their own archives. So the scrub seems to have been pretty thorough.

Kevin Drum acknowledges that Bush has pictures taken with lots of people so it's not necessarily a big deal...

But when photo agencies go to the trouble of deleting pictures of Bush and Abramoff from their website, then deleting them permanently from their own CDs, and then claiming that they did it all on their own with no direction from the White House or anyone else — well, that just starts to sound a little suspicious, doesn't it? If the White House isn't guilty of anything, why are they skulking around in shadows so much?