Political advisers to President Bush may have improperly used their Republican National Committee e-mail accounts to conduct official government business, and some communications that are required to be preserved under federal law may be
lost as a result, White House officials said Wednesday. - New York Times, April 12, 2007
A secret FBI intelligence unit helped detain a group of war protesters in a downtown Washington parking garage in April 2002 and interrogated some of them on videotape about their political and religious beliefs, newly uncovered documents and interviews show. For years, law enforcement authorities suggested it never happened. The FBI and D.C. police
said they had no records of such an incident. - Washington Post, April 3, 2007
In DOJ documents that were publicly posted by the House Judiciary Committee, there is a
gap from mid-November to early December in e-mails and other memos, which was a critical period as the White House and Justice Department reviewed, then approved, which U.S. attorneys would be fired while also developing a political and communications strategy for countering any fallout from the firings. - The Politico, March 24, 2007
The disclosure that the Pentagon had
lost a potentially important piece of evidence in one of the U.S. government's highest-profile terrorism cases was met with claims of incredulity by some defense lawyers and human-rights groups monitoring the case. "This is the kind of thing you hear when you're litigating cases in Egypt or Morocco or Karachi," said John Sifton, a lawyer with Human Rights Watch, one of a number of groups that has criticized the U.S. government's treatment of Padilla. "It is simply not credible that they would have lost this tape. The administration has shown repeatedly they are more interested in covering up abuses than getting to the bottom of whether people were abused." - Newsweek, February 27, 2007
[Federal Emergency Management Agency Michael] Brown's comments about the president surfaced in a transcript of an Aug. 29, 2005, videoconference call produced by Bush administration officials today after they initially
told Congress that no such document existed. - Newsweek, March 1, 2006
The White House
failed to archive some e-mails in accordance with normal procedures in 2003, according to a letter from a special prosecutor investigating the leak of a CIA operative's identity. - New York Sun, February 2, 2006
Key documents are
missing from the batch of newly declassified documents the White House released this week on its policies on torture and the treatment of prisoners, critics say. Absent are any memos to and from the FBI and CIA and any documents dated after April 2003. No documents address the State Department's concern over the Bush administration's interpretation of the Geneva Conventions. - NPR, June 24, 2004
The Pentagon sought Sunday to explain why some 2,000 pages were
missing from a congressional copy of a classified report detailing the alleged acts of abuse by soldiers against Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib prison. - USA Today, May 24, 2004
Documents that should have been written to explain gaps in President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service are
missing from the military records released about his service in 1972 and 1973, according to regulations and outside experts. - Associated Press, September 5, 2004
--------------------------------
<< As an attorney who deals with subpoenas and requests for electronic documents on a regular basis, I can tell you that if a private entity--particularly one subject to legally mandated record keeping requirements--were to inform government investigators seeking such documents that they had been "mishandled" and were now "lost," that entity would immediately find itself in a world of hurt and would be lucky if it survived the aftermath.
No amount of talking would be enough to convince the authorities that there was an innocent explanation for the missing documents. They would be absolutely convinced that the "mishandled" documents were intentionally destroyed in order to cover up wrongdoing. >>And that is particularly true if -- as is true for the Bush administration -- the party claiming to have "lost" or "mishandled" such key evidence had a long history of making such claims repeatedly with the effect of blocking investigations. And the presumption of corrupt intent would be stronger still if, as in the case of the Bush administration, one of the party's highest officials was recently found guilty of multiple counts of obstruction of justice and false statements for lying to FBI investigators and to a federal grand jury.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/?last_story=%2Fopinion%2Fgreenwald%2F2007%2F04%2F12%2Flost_documents%2F
