Where's that damn e-mail? The plot thickens.

Josh Marshall notes that the WH seems to have been party to some electronic equivalent of "shredding". I wonder why?

One of our readers found this in a brief New York Daily News update on the status of the Scooter Libby prosecution. The meat of the article is about Libby's effort to get prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to fork over White House documents he got copies of during the investigation.

But down there in the last graf there's this ...

Fitzgerald, who is fighting Libby's request, said in a letter to Libby's lawyers that many e-mails from Cheney's office at the time of the Plame leak in 2003 have been deleted contrary to White House policy.

Does that seem a bit odd?

Fitzgerald's letter says that "we have learned that not all email of the Office of Vice President and the Executive Office of President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system."

Anyone know anything more about this?

Atrios sheds some light:

Of course, this is rather unsurpring given that barely remarked upon action by Abu Gonzales:

Washington -- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Sunday that he spoke with White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card immediately after learning that the Justice Department had begun a criminal investigation into the leak of a CIA operative's identity. But Gonzales, who was White House counsel at the time, waited 12 hours before officially notifying the rest of the staff of the inquiry.

Scrub scrub scrub...

georgia10 over at the DailyKOS says:

This is a beautiful move by Fitzgerald, because remember, the charges against Libby are obstruction of justice and perjury. So how does this make the sweat glisten on Gonzales' brow? We all know about the 12 hour gap, that twilight zone between the evening of September 23, 2003 (when Gonzales was informed of the order to preserve evidence) and September 24, 2003 (when Gonzales actually gave the order to retain evidence). But it's not just a 12 hour gap that provided a chance to tamper with the evidence. It's a two week gap. Recall that Gonzales and the rest of the White House lawyers screened every communication before handing it over to Fitzgerald.