Are the 14 Million "Found" White House Emails the New Watergate Tapes?
Perhaps the most frequently-asked question about Watergate is: "How could the conspirators have been so foolish, gabbing away even though they knew the tape recorder was on?" The answer: They were human, and, as such, erred.
Anne Weisman, chief counsel for the non-profit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, compared the infamous gap in the Nixon-Haldeman Oval Office tape to the 14 million White House emails from March 2003 to October 2005 that were missing during the investigation of the Valerie Plame CIA leak, when they might have yielded a smoking gun.
"The Watergate Tapes had an eighteen-and-a-half minute gap where [Nixon secretary] Rosemary Woods did whatever she did," Weisman told me. "We're talking here about a gap of at least fourteen million emails."
Rosemary Woods demonstrates how she accidentally may have erased tapesEarly this year, the White House found the emails -- it turns out they never were missing but rather, unaccounted for due to a "flawed and limited" internal review. On January 14, Weisman convinced a federal court to order the White House to preserve the emails and all relevant records.
Now, filling in the gaps in the CIA leak case -- like why Bush administration officials exposed Valerie Plame Wilson's covert operative status to Robert Novak and other journalists -- may be as simple as entering "plame" as a search term (or "plane," allowing for misspelling).
"Email is a blessing, and it can be a curse, because it's a written record," Weisman said. "And people know that intellectually. Still they dash off emails, without thinking about what they're saying, as if they're talking on the phone. As a result, you get a lot of very honest information that isn't scrutinized the way official memoranda are."
Weisman also recognizes the possibility that the perpetrators of the leak had the good sense not to chronicle their activities. Or they may have simply deleted their emails.
I interviewed two computer forensics experts familiar with the White House system. Per requests for anonymity, what follows is an amalgam of those interviews:
Q: Can you recover a deleted email?
A: Piece of cake.
Q: Is there a way to delete an email so that computer forensics experts would be unable to find any trace of it?
A: There are hundreds of ways.
Q: If the deleted email had been sent using the White House server, could you still locate it on the backup tapes? [Every night, backup tapes of all White House emails are made and stored in a separate location in case of fire or disaster; the March 2003 to October 2005 tapes also were unaccounted for during the leak investigation].
A: The backup tapes could contain the deleted email, absolutely.
Q: Could someone delete an email that's on a backup tape?
A: You could easily just make a new backup tape. Put on whatever time and date stamp you want. From an evidentiary standpoint, the stamps are meaningless.
Q: So if a perpetrator pulled that off, is that the end of your investigation?
A: More like the beginning. Like an old-fashioned gumshoe, you try to sniff out clues.
Q: For instance?
A: A very simplistic example is, even if there's no evidence of emails written to robert.novak@washingtonpost.com, that address may still be in the email address book on a staffer's computer or BlackBerry. [The Bush administration was also ordered to turn over all devices containing emails.] Something as little as that can broaden the scope of the investigation.
Q: What if that address has been expunged from the address book?
A: The entire hard drive may have been swapped out. But the trail doesn't necessarily go cold there.
In other words, the computer forensics investigation, fundamentally, is as old as hide-and-seek, and will continue to be so until computers can be programmed to remedy human error. Assuming mistakes were made, the scope of the investigation would conceivably expand beyond the 14 million existing White House emails to every email the leakers ever have sent and received: In the digital age, the world increasingly is becoming an Oval Office Tape Recorder 2.0.
I spoke to perhaps the world's foremost expert on the subject, James Bamford, a former intelligence analyst who wrote The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, his third New York Times best-selling book about the National Security Administration. "In order to send an email, the White House has to send it via Novak's server," he said. "Novak's email provider would have the content, if they've kept it until now."
Internet service providers routinely make daily back-up tapes. Moreover, a Yahoo! official told me that her company has retained a majority of individual user emails, since 1997, and has no plans to throw them out. Google has a similar offline backup system. So even if one of the leakers eschewed the White House server and sent the smoking-gun using a personal Yahoo! account from his mother-in-law's laptop computer in Cheboygan, then flung the computer into Lake Michigan, the correspondence likely would be available in its entirety.
Bamford noted that logs of telephone calls placed and received by the leaker would be readily accessible at this juncture as well. In addition, according to a CIA source, it's not out of the realm of possibility that some of the audio was captured by intelligence agency communication intercept systems.
The sum total is Anne Weisman's prospects for reeling in the new Haldeman or Erlichman may be greatly enhanced. Weisman wouldn't mind if, in the process, light were shed on such issues as the U.S. Attorney firings controversy, editing of government reports to downplay scientific findings about global warming, and how exactly 14 million emails were lost to a "flawed and limited" internal review in the first place.
So what is her immediate plan?
Wait.
For five years, at least.
The 14 million emails have been transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration along with 300 million other documents. In accordance with the Presidential Records Act, it will be five years before the Freedom of Information Act allows her to seek a single correspondence.
In the interim, the Supreme Court may hear her case, Wilson v. Libby, potentially giving her subpoena power. She considers her best shots, however, to be either an Act of Congress or an initiative taken by the Obama administration. "They may not want to have to defend the old administration," she said. "They may think the American public deserves to know what happened."
Failing that, the hope is to receive an email from deep.throat2009@hotmail.com.
H.R. Haldeman, Nixon's White House Chief of Staff
Former CIA covert officer Valerie Plame Wilson
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And all the REACTIONARY crybabies are now going to say "Let bygones be bygones" right?
These 14 million e-mail should be investigated by an independent counsel NOW and, if there is fire where we saw smoke, criminal proceedings against the principals should be opened.
If we can force the issue for "travelgate" and "oral sex", I think we can force the issue for Constitutional violations and war crimes.
Unless I am missing something she is a private citizen right, then let her investigate till the cows come home. But don't as the dems and O to throw away their chance to actually GOVERN to help her. Of course the GOP was wrong on both Travelgate, and Monca, the issue here is do we want to make the same mistake they did. There is short term thinking and long term thinking. Short term: do to them what they did to us, show them what the rule of law really looks like. Long term: spend all out energy and money and political capital on getting the 7-9 GOP senate seats and the 20-30 house seats that are vulnerable in 2010, change the dynamic of the conversation, it isn't about 60 seats in the senate it is about 70. Once we have 2010 done, 2012 looks like a war for us, but we have a secret weapon, O is running and he will carry seats in 2012 that we should lose.... UNLESS we do what BigHead Todd wants and go nutty on Bush. We will lose seats we should win in the next two cycles that way. Let me tell you what happens in 2010 if we win 7-9 seats and hold all of ours for the third cycle. The GOP vanishes. Their party ceases to exist.
Like the 1500 "lost" FBI files, you mean?
Unfinished Watergate business remains front page news to this day---literally front page news today, on the front page of the New York Times.
The Plame business continues to have serious repercussions, not least of which are American covert operations officers and their agents operating with their wings clipped by fear of exposure--or worse, not operating, for fear of exposure.
Why not sort it out asap?
If this country is to move forward we must investigate and clean up the mess left by the Bush Administration.
Violation to the Constitution and Bill Of Rights can not be swept under the rug if we wish to keep this country free.
Justice and The Rule of Law is what makes the United States a Great Nation.
Check your calendar. Bush ain't the President anymore. Get a life.
And them parking tickets you've been ignoring are going away too, old Readytsf..
You are right. A lot of juntas do get to fade away into their villas because scared people keep saying "what's past is past." But not all of them. Let's hope that thought keeps you and the Bush junta awake at night.
Why are Bush and Cheney not in jail for what they did regarding Valerie Plame.
It's America's shame (more even than Bush + Cheney) because America lets them 'GET AWAY WITH IT ALL!!!!
Lost and found, or lost and found as forgeries?
If there's nothing incriminating, we can by default, assume the latter.
After thoughtful consideration about this whole email issue, I have to say Valerie Plame Wilson is HOT!
Hmm. Brin was right. His Transparent Society is coming to be.... accountability as the ruled get the goods on the rulers. http://en.
Here is an interesting and vital new jobs program in the Department of Justice. Hire hundreds of unemployed computer geeks and let them search through the Bush administration E-mails for the damning evidence of criminal activity up to and including culpability for the terrorist acts of 9-11. No greater public service could be rendered. It could be like the CCC all over again with an equally important outcome.
It would only take a handful of employees to do this job.
The fact is anyone with IT forensic investigation and/or security experience and access to the data will locate the email(s). I’ll testify that this process is very tedious, not overly difficult.
The most likely avenues for the contents to become public (in less than five years) are:
1. Rove, in response to current Congressional subpoena, is questioned about the US Attorneys. His actions (including emails) are covered. Either:
Rove testifies tangentially about involvement in Plame, requiring data to be subpoenaed (unlikely). Or:
Rove invokes the Fifth Amendment. Congress subpoenas the archive/other evidence. Evidence encountered during the search relates to Plame (possibly relates to federal crimes – in one of many areas).
2. Another federal lawsuit filed requires contents of the email(s) as evidence. The court orders them searched, and applicable email surrendered to the court.
3. A Congressional investigation requires an email search to be conducted and results made public (via Congress).
4. A FOIA request by ACLU, Judicial Watch, etc. is fulfilled (concerning the contents of the email), or denied. The court orders the email(s) surrendered after a lawsuit filed concerning the denial.
6. Someone with access to the backups/ar
7. The Obama administration decides (described above) to locate the applicable contents of the email(s) and make them public in one manner or another.
Oh the sludge that is the Bush administration. We're gonna need rubber gloves and gas masks just to muddle through this.
I am elated that the emails were located. I am not confident that they will ever be exposed to daylight.
What they contain could very well shake this nation to it's core and bring democracy to it's knees in its wide reaching (world-wide) negative effect. I don't think I exaggerate when I say the information may threaten the foundation of our nation.
I'd like to see a waiver for FOIA access on something so important - can't wait to see this unfold.
NSA has copiess of those emails! Sure, they were laundered through SmarTech Inc., and WH servers were scrubbed, but... somewhere in Maryland there are complete records. And custom search and data mining capabilities, too!
It's so true.
Irony at it's best. The "terrorist surveillance program" catches the real terrorists running our government.
Being a Network Engineer myself (though I admittedly have limited forensics experience) I will say that it is likely they will find what they are looking for. It is hard to purge that level of data.
The idea though that they will find evidence at an ISP that has a back up is unrealistic. ISP's do not save backups for years. It is a storage issue.
I sure do hope they get these guys though. I sure would like to be a fly on the wall why they are search emails and hard drives.
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