SIS has “filled in” the blanks
I gotta say, Steven McNevitt and his colleagues appear pretty skeptical that all of the OVP emails responsive to Fitzgerald’s subpoenas were actually recovered.
I noted yesterday that there had been two parallel attempts to recover the OVP email missing from the period when Libby and Cheney invented their cover story for having leaked Valerie Plame’s identity. Page 43-46 of the Additional Materials is the documentation from McDevitt’s attempt to reconstruct the emails. It consists of a plan developed on November 28, 2005 to reconstruct the emails, with updates from January 20, 2006 describing the results of that attempt.
The environment information gathering activities were successfully completed. As a result, it was determined that the Exchange server used to support the OVP mailboxes was [redacted] and the Journal Mailbox server that was used durring the target period was OVP_JOURNAL.
[snip]
Analysis of the files contained on the file server that were used to store .PST files during the target period was performed and no messages were found that filled the gap of missing messages for the target period.
[snip]
The server that contained the journal mailboxes for the target period was successfully restored, This was from a backup that was performed on 10/21/2003. The journal mailboxes were examined and no messages for the target period were present in the joumal mailbox.
[snip]
The Exchange server that contained the OVP mailboxes for the target period was restored from a backup that was performed on 10/21/2003. OA Human Resources produced a list of active OVP staff for the target period. This list was reviewed and confirmed by OVP.
The Exchange server that contained the OVP mailboxes was restored. This was from a backup that was performed on 10/21/2003. The email from the target period was extracted from each of the 70 OVP mailboxes and copied to a .PST file. [my emphasis]
In response to this report, on January 23, 2006 McDevitt writes a group of people who had worked on the restoration attempt and the larger missing email problem.
Someone needs to fill in some of the blanks.
Susan Crippen responds just two hours later.
SIS has "filled in" the blanks.
We know from the Committee report that a White House team wrote a document one day later–on January 24–claiming to have recovered 17,956 emails from the email backup tapes.
According to a document dated just four days later that was shown to Committee staff, but not provided to them, the White House team recovercd 17,956 e-mails from these individual mailboxes on the backup tape and used these as their basis to search for e-mails responsive to the Special Counsel’s request.
In his interrogatory, McDevitt makes clear that he had nothing to do with this effort–and is rather quiet about it.
There was a parallel effort to attempt to recover all ernail from this period. The results of this effort were the 250 pages of email. However, I was not directly involved in this process and am unable to provide any details relating to the 250 pages of email.
What McDevitt doesn’t say–perhaps because the White House doesn’t want him to talk about this stuff–is that someone whose technical abilities he apparently trusted, Susan Crippen, considered the efforts of SIS (whatever that is) to be farcical enough that she referred to the outcome of that effort using square quotes, SIS "filled in" the blanks.
Now there’s a lot of reason to doubt the completeness of the final recovery process. OVP had 15 days between the time when the emails and logs disappeared and the time when an actual backup of their email archives was made. Those 15 days span from the time when Libby and Cheney were concocting their cover story through the firs. On October 7–the day after the period for which there were no emails or logs–Jenny Mayfield dodged her responsibility for turning emails over by saying, "I understand that you, David Addington, have done a central email search."
And the on February 5, when she certified her response to the subpoena that would actually have produced the emails in question (it asked for materials relating to, among other things, Wilson, Niger, and Plame since October 1), Mayfield again pawned off her responsibilities on David Addington. 
In other words, at least Libby and his assistant very conveniently didn’t do a localized search for precisely the emails that might have "filled in" the blanks.
Also, during that same 15 day period between when OVP wrote emails that mysteriously disappeared without a log, most of OVP had their first interviews with the FBI, giving them at least an inking of the scope of the investigation.
Now, I don’t know what SIS is, but I would wager that Susan Crippen (and McDevitt) believe its efforts to "fill in the blanks" of the missing email to be wholly inadequate. Since there should have been a log of the missing emails, but wasn’t, it makes it very possible that someone made sure not all emails would be recovered.
No wonder Theresa Payton is in no hurry to reconstruct all the missing emails.
MARCY!
I wonder if anybody working on any of the legal cases, say for instance the National Security Archive/CREW has ever considered the possibility of noticing up the deposition of one Mr. David Addington in his Custodian of Documents capacity….
Oh, Mayfield too; but Addington would be the fun one.
EW, I don’t know what SIS is either, so I thought I’d do a wee bit of googling.
And here’s something that matches the topic, but I don’t yet understand what it means:
Perhaps Susan was making a joke?
I’m still perusing and pondering.
I didn’t mention it in this post, but remember that at least one of the “found” emails was printed off using Addington’s personal login.
I’m still one of those conspiracy
buffstheorists who pegs David Addington for all kinds of nefarious doings.Including knowing how to get his hands dirty down in the bowels of Microsoft’s product guts. *g*
SIS (single instance storage) would be to his liking, then– wouldn’t have to worry about as many copies floating around somewhere.
Bob in HI
How does an “Internal Transcript” of a WH press briefing differ from the actual transcript, and why would part of it need to be redacted?
This was a trial exhibit. They redacted the parts that cast guilt on Libby–they were trying to very narrowly get to the stuff that pertained to Libby’s attempts to get McClellan to exonerate him.
So the redactions are Fitzgerald’s work, not Addingtons.
Sounds to me like you’re on to something.
What’s new in Exchange 2000
I don’t think it is likely that she was referring to Exchange Server’s “single instance storage” capability. Single instance storage allows just a single copy of a message in a message store even though the message may have been “sent” to every user in that message store/server.
This is possible by managing per-user refcounts to that specific message which track read/unread and deleted status. A message sent to 100 people who are spread across five message stores/servers would have only five instances.
What is interesting is that messages don’t get marked for deletion in the server message store until all of the addressees in that store/server have deleted the message. Once the message has been “tombstoned” there is a configuration setting that specifies how long to keep the messages before purging from the system (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324358).
If a single user failed to delete the message on any store and if a backup tape could be found during that period it might be recovered from the server store.
It seems like we have to rely on an system plugged in to the Message Journaling feature in E2K (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/843105/en-us). The challenge here is that once the messages have been journaled they are then copied to PSTs by some external process and open to deliberate redaction.
I’m still not clear on the storage setup for the users in question; were they working with server storage only or server and PST file storage?
~GC
Also note, about that email, MadDog–it doesn’t appear to tbe result of a search in a particular volume, as the others do.
You mean like they plucked it out by itself because they liked it but not any of the others and wanted it to look like a stand alone?
Well, it wasn’t a standalone–it was 13 pages of the 250 pages turned over.
But it seems like Addington just pulled it up from a sort within a client-end search function, as if I just sorted through my GMail folders and didn’t print out the ones pertaining to Judy Miller.
That is kind of what I meant. I think…..
There is a real good reason that I stay mostly out of the tech discussions; I am not competent.
Payton yesterday made reference a couple of times to associations being broken — I wonder if that’s what happened with the SIS feature.
The “Subj:” line mentions “Updated MST Presentation” and an attachment of “Exchange MST Plan…”
I’m guessing here, but it would seem that the MST acronym they are using is shorthand for “Message Store” (and not for Microsoft’s Transform which is also used in MS literature as MST), so “Exchange MST…” would be referring to Exchange’s Message Store.
That use of the “Message Store” term is common in the MS Exchange world (and everybody else’s email systems too) and so is its acronym of MST.
That kinda ties it in with Exchange’s Single Instance Storage feature which goes by the acronym of SIS.
I’m still wrestling with the idea that Susan’s reference to SIS “filled in” the blanks as some kind of techie humor, but I admit I may be wrong. *g*
EW,
Maybe the reference to SIS’ ability to “fill in” the blanks means that SIS just concocted some emails for the target period to “fill in” for the emails OVP deliberately “lost”.
That would also explain why McDevitt distanced himself from that effort.
I think it might be this SIS:
http://www.sis.com/pressroom/p…..000286.htm
SIS makes chipsets (kinda like Intel and AMD do) which is certainly “computer stuff”, but I don’t think they’d be helping the White House find missing emails.
Good try LS, but I don’t think they will get my vote. *g*
William F. Buckley, R.I.P.
Indira Singh has spoken about a computer program used by the government that is “behind” what you see…i.e., that where you look for information is a front for where the info actually is. It is hidden. Ptech.
I think there is a perfectly simple explanation for the absence of any emails from the Vice President’s Office. Of course, it involves a blowtorch and some melted hard drives. Sort of brings back to mind that fire a couple of months back in Cheney’s offices in the Executive Office Building.
I suspect, but am not yet sure, that SIS, in this context, is System Integration Support. Oddly enough, Single Instance Storage probably does play a role in this fiasco, but that’s not what they are talking about here.
I was thinking it was the acronym for some IT group. So so far I vote with your suggestion.
Ah ha! That is a much better use of the SIS acronym…in this one instance. *g*
How about this SIS…*g*:
http://www.mi6.gov.uk/output/Page79.html
I took the SIS reference to mean that Addington or one of his clones had been successful in scrubbing embarrassing emails from the system.
Funny you should mention the real SIS. I was thinking along the same lines as you.
Perhaps Tony “The Poodle” Blair had his James Bond SIS crew “fix” Deadeye’s missing email problem.
Kinda like the way you’d “fix” a cat. No disrepect to any cat-lovers intended. *g*
I think that is a real possibility.
“Filled in” – sarcastic and means the opposite. “Erased”
our tax dollars at work:
“Congress Seeks Perjury Probe of Clemens”
http://abcnews.go.com/Sports/s…..038;page=1
I’m psyched.
This is an asinine railroad job irrespective of his guilt. Whoever wrote that ABC report doesn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground either.
Is this what bi-partisanship looks like?
Slightly different topic: on the subject of Karl Rove and the RNC emails – why wasn’t Karl Rove’s Blackberry ever seized as evidence? How long do Blackberries keep records of email?
MadDog and WO (and anyone else)
Review this with me again. If the journal mailboxes had nothing for the dates of the missing emails, but we know there were 18,000 emails sent during that peiod, doesn’t that mean the journal mailboxes were deleted? We know there HAD to be something in them once.
There are a few possibilities:
1. The process for creating the pst files includes deleting the mail from the journal mailboxes (almost a certainty). Somebody just had to delete the .pst files.
2. Somebody turned off journaling (less likely, but possible).
3. Somebody deleted stuff from the journal mailboxes without creating the .pst files.
Sorry. I’m thinking really slowly here. First, correct me if I’m wrong, but none of these woudl NORMALLY happen, right?
So in this case, the abnormality would be that the .PST files were deleted? But it appeasr that McDevitt fully expected to find journal mailboxes, right? Why would he expect that if the journal mailboxes were normally deleted?
I this case, it would mean that for the period when OVP was busy concocting a cover story, someone just thought to turn off the journaling function, but that it’s possible none of the emails were deleted?
This seems like the most likely, given that there were no emails from this period. Do you agree? And if so, it says the emails were sent, but then sometime between October 6 and October 21, someone went in and deleted everything?
I think the most likely explanation is this:
(from IT’s viewpoint)
First, they discover that the .pst files are missing. Since the process for creating them is entirely manual, they assume the .pst files never got created, therefore the mail should be in the journal mailboxes in the last backup. They restore those and discover no journaled email. At this point, people are worried about getting fired, going to jail, etc. So they restore the whole Exchange server mailstore and start pulling up messages from the mailboxes. It would be in everybody’s interest to assume that all the mail was there, but the reality is users who emailed each other could have deleted the emails out of their mailboxes and then deleted the .pst files (which back in 2003 were open to everybody).
Oh, so when you say the journal mailboxes were deleted, that’s your assumption that once the .pst files were “archived” the journal mailboxes got deleted?
In addition to WO’s #30, I had this thought regarding you question:
One reading I took of the “nothing was found” was that nothing “related” to the search criteria was found. That didn’t mean there were no emails, but just that no relevant emails were found.
On the surface, the idea that nothing relevant was found strikes me as suspicious given the timelines you’ve laid out EW.
How could there not be chatter about the Fitz subpoenas? That doesn’t compute.
And the fact that nothing relevant was found would lead one to suspect deliberate deletions.
Where was David Addington and what was he doing on that computer?
But the point was we KNOW there were relevant emails. This one was one of the ones produced by (presumably) SIS. We know that because of the date it was printed out and the date it was sent.
And this gets to my conundrum. How could they find “nothing” in one set of processes and yet magically produce “something” with another set of “SIS” processes?
If I remember correctly from McDevitt’s letter, he was getting assistance from Microsoft so you’d think with the Customer being the White House, OA would have got the best expertise Microsoft had to offer on the task.
have not been following the details of this issue… so probably my question is stupid. but couldn’t there be two sets of books (or, in this case backups)? the public set and a private set?
And with that, the implication that there are 2 sets of accountants. *g*
If we believe anyone can open anyone else “inbox”, Addington gave himself access to the inboxes he wanted to search and printed emails that were search criteria “hits”.
It’s not unual to grant someone proxy access to some elses inbox, i.e. legal secretary to his/her attorney’s inbox, executive assistant to executives inbox, it’s done to allow them to schedule events on the attorney’s/executive’s calendar among other things.
What is completely unusual is the file level access to everyone’s pst’s including journaling pst’s was read, write, execute and delete.
Addington is SIS, hence the snark of SIS has filled in the blanks. For
their own use the deleted files are in the custody of PTech, their fave
IT company, not held in this country.
Along the lines of my thinking.
I don’t know about the particular people/codenames/companies you’ve identified, but this certainly fits my observation yesterday that the fact that they all seem so curiously unconcerned that they were operating the frickin’ White House without any email backups could be fully explained by the existence of a parallel, offsite, secret backup regimen based on the existence of at least one connection to another network, on at least one computer on the EOP net. (Pause to consider the security implications there, please.) That would also explain all 3000+ users’ computers having being unsecured from one another — something that would be an utterly anathema firing offense in any ordinary IT operation. And if remote backup were possible… so would remote snooping be. Of the White House.
There’s an impeachable offense that would outrage any American.
bingo
Among favorite virtual offsite locations for data storage, China is a standout. Glad we have no obvious conflicts with them over little things like oil, human rights, theft and commercialization of technology, Taiwan, or control over sea lanes in the Western Pacific. Similar issues might arise if the site were in India or Estonia or any of the other favorite low cost, high-tech sites.
Virtual data can end up in such places either directly or because that’s where a supplier or sub-supplier maintains its technology, operation or server farm. Or because someone hacked into a data stream that routed through a vulnerable node. (That’s how the US does much of its digital spying.)
China, for example, might not bother hacking a system to learn about GM’s newest engine technology – GM probably already gave it to them to sell a couple of Buicks in Shanghai – but the possibility of discovering internal WH comms would attract every government hacker on the planet.
Which is why the apparent disarray in these arrangements – and the possibility of duplicate, RNC or other “private” repositories for official WH data – is deeply troubling. These are things Congress and the American people should not have to guess about.
It’s right here. Why would they need a parallel search — which ultimately “found” the select 250 emails. Why?
“There was a parallel effort to attempt to recover all email from this period. The results of this effort were the 250 pages of email. However, I was not directly involved in this process and am unable to provide any details relating to the 250 pages of email.”
That sounds like shadow government stuff.
Addington is a very odd bird. He’s at the center of the Cheney universe, but the man doesn’t seem to know how to lie. His testimony at the Libby trial was utterly devastating, and he volunteered a lot of information that he didn’t need to give up. He could have just “forgotten” all of his relevant conversations with Libby; instead, he recalled them in vivid detail. Along those lines, I wonder if he has any personality quirks about erasing things. He could be the type who always has some sort of backup copy tucked away somewhere.
I agree with you — that is how he struck me…unless they all agreed to let Libby take the fall as a diversion..
I don’t think so. First of all, that would be one hell of a diversion. Second, if Libby beat the rap, they’d all be off the hook. There was no reason for Addington to pile on him. I think he did it because he doesn’t know how to keep his mouth shut. Which is probably why they never let him talk to the press.
They knew Libby was screwed and he couldn’t put on a real defense. It was lots of sound and fury signifying nothing, imo. Addington wanted to avoid a perjury charge for himself, so he told the truth, knowing Scooter had either a pardon or commutation coming anyway. Sacrifice the one to protect the group kinda thang.
But yeah, he may have one of quirks about remembering everything and talking too much. He might be a really fun witness for Waxman.
Trust me. I have told everyone in DC who will listen that they need to subpoena Addington, including two Congressmen and a few top staffers on relevant committees. No one seems to want to get their ass handed to them by Addington. I think Whitehouse would be up for it, and SJC in general. But that’s just me.
But here’s the deal. The WH won’t let Addington testify anyway, so why not go ahead and make the record of that? It is a rhetorical question……
Though, if he were asked to testify on the subjects he has already testified too, they’ll look dumb objecting.
Not that it’ll stop them. But still.
Yes that would be horrid; Congress might actually get testimony. Pay no attention to me, I will try to refrain from such preaching to the choir.
I can understand their nervousness about questioning Addington. Only the experienced prosecutors/lawyers, like Whitehouse, should be allowed to talk to him. Most on the committee would need to use a surrogate, like in the Watergate hearings. I believe much of the questioning then was done by staff attorneys and investigators.
As one who remembers watching Congressional hearings as far back as when Joe Welch carved Joe McCarthy a new one with a scalpel, I agree that hearings would be far more productive if most Congress Critters turned the Q & A over to professionals. Today such events are virtually worthless, given the facts that a) most Critters don’t know what they’re doing and b) the time limits on each, combined with the need of each to look important on C-Span, exclude the possibility of a sustained interrogation strategy.
I certainly can’t diagnose something like this, but seeing Addington live (well, on close circuit TV), he seemed like he might have Aspergers or something.
I was thinking along those lines too.
Paging Bill Frist.
My son has aspergers. From my experience,people with aspergers rarely lie. They are too literal. And when they’re lying, you know it.
Addington’s butt needs to be hauled into Waxman’s committee and grilled.
And EW, regardless of the definition of the term SIS (and I agree with you that WO’s conjecture is likely), I agree that the very fact that we have this email from Susan Crippen with Steven McDevitt’s original rings my alarm bell too!
There is something suspiciously cryptic or cryptically suspicious about the tone in their email.
As if these two weren’t party to whatever SIS was doing and that they didn’t approve/like/trust the results.
FWIW, on tech stuff FDL’s Cujo359 was always real good. He might not know, but iirc, he had good contacts who might have an opinion. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to contact him.
Remember Mystery Commenter — Deep Modem???
http://www.democraticundergrou…..id=1658309
Check through the links to CREW – mystery poster:
http://www.democraticundergrou…..id=1690879
I don’t get this, but I’m curious. What’s the point?
“Primitive” is a generous description of the Bush White House’s digital communications and record keeping. It’s more the way a bookie would do it, on rapid-burning rice paper, so that if the feds walk in, the evidence goes up in flames before you can say, “Al Capone”.
That “SIS” is an unknown acronym is a pretty good sign its staffed by Rovites. That a White House e-mail archival system lags real time by fifteen days – given the legal obligation to preserve all presidential records – is a risk tolerance for loss or corruption of data that only an invader of Iraq could tolerate. That only select log files, etc., are missing without a systemic explanation or fault is especially troublesome. These are attributes of a system that was either purposely archaic when newly implemented, to replace an older but more fully functioning system, or one that’s been hacked and filleted by talented people from across the Potomac.
At a minimum, Waxman and Co., should document the hell out of everything they can get their hands on so that prosecutors can sift through it later. Which should tell Obama that his people had better plan out a new, stem-to-stern digital communications and archiving system. Whatever the White House has now is wholly corrupted and, in any case, will be needed as evidence in future litigation.
What should not be lost among claims of political corruption and violations of various criminal laws, is that this willful mismanagement and damage – directly caused by this White House – will cost multiple tens of millions of dollars to fix. It will have to come from tax revenues that are already stretched beyond endurance. Starving the beast, indeed….
Great comment, thanks.
What I’m peeved about is MSNBC’s (Matthews & Olbermann) decision to
concentrate on the election at the expense of something as important
as the obstruction of justice through e-mail destruction.
Sic Shuster on the story and make it the lead story.
Please…
Systems Infrastructure and Support.
We might keep in mind that Cheney runs this White House. Cheney, like Rove, regards the law as a cudgel or a hurdle to throw into an opponent’s way. The idea of complying with a law such as the Presidential Records Act, that restricts the whims of a CEO by recording his doings in too much detail, Cheney would find laughable, and then dismiss any lawyer who suggested it.
Cheney hates open government and is obsessed with defeating it. He hides his own staff, his own files, his own work. He pushes adoption of that attitude throughout the federal government. He also has access to very good IT people in and outside government. No one still employed at the NSA or DIA or CIA would hesitate to digitally ream an opponent a new orifice if word came down from Libby or Addington that Cheney wants it done, in the interest of national security. No recoverable record would be spared.
Lastly, Cheney projects his own worst traits and nightmares on his opponents, including rank and file citizens who might want to know what he does. Consequently, Cheney’s team would have thought long and hard about White House record keeping, telecoms, servers, forensic recovery and the like. As inept as this White House is about many things, it seems unlikely that the quality of its publicly acknowledged record keeping is anything but what Cheney wants.
This is completely fascinating, a couple of observations on the non-technical side (and correct any mistakes I might be making).
In other words, at least Libby and his assistant very conveniently didn’t do a localized search for precisely the emails that might have “filled in” the blanks.
I don’t quite understand why this is suspicious, particularly because the document request in October 2003 only went through September 30, and not into October.
That said, September 30 is included in both the document request from DoJ and in the target period for which there were no emails. But then check this out: on October 3, 2003 Addington faxes Swartz a copy of an email he (Addington) had sent out to OVP people on . . . September 30. It’s GX 52. And guess what? GX 52 was not produced by OVP – it is clearly the fax itself that Swartz received. Presumably that September 30 email was not produced separately to the investigation by OVP, right? But then doesn’t that mean that the investigators were at least in a position right from the start to recognize that they weren’t getting everything – unless Addington just turned over a hard copy of the email he had printed out?
Second, a few details on the timeline of October 2003. It is truly right in that target time that a lot of action seems to have taken place in OVP. Libby told the FBI (according to Bond 2-1 p.m., p. 91) that he found the note reflecting his June 2003 conversation where Cheney told Libby that WIlson’s wife worked in CPD on October 3, 2003. So according to Libby’s account, he had a conversation some time shortly before that where he told Cheney that Russert had told him about Plame, then he went back to Cheney after finding the note – presumably on the 3rd – and updated him on what he was going to have to cop to, i.e. that CHeney had told him about PLame in June 2003. It’s hard to know how much to credit this, since it may just be a cover story for the cover-up. But I suspect it tracks pretty closely the timeline, and in fact how it was done. But it’s also worth noting that, according to Wells 2-5 p.m., pp. 21-22, Libby and his secretary (Mayfield?) left D.C. for Philadelphia and then continued on to Wyoming for the weekend, returning early afternoon on the 6th. That is interesting in its own right in this connection. Wells was trying to compress the time Libby had to respond to the investigation’s demands, and it is a little misleading for him to note, as he does, that the document request from Addington only came in on the 3rd, because in fact Addington sent out the less formal demand for document retention on the 30th, which means it remains possible Libby was looking for stuff and came across the June 2003 note and alerted Cheney on the 3rd, rather than later.
But all of this certainly heightens the significance of the fact that it is precisely that period that lacks emails.
Also of note is that Heiden appears to have found Cheney’s copy of Wilson’s op-ed in the safe (presumably the human-size safe!) on October 7, or at least she turned a copy over to ADdington and returned the original to the safe on the 7th. It also appears to be on the 7th that McClellan clears Libby publicly – he reiterates the clearing at the press briefing that day, alluding to some earlier assertion of Libby’s innocence, which have been in the gaggle that morning. So basically at that point on the 7th, the whole fix is in.
Finally, just for fun, remember that Novak’s cover-up conversation with Rove took place on September 29.
This may be a browser issue, but my assertion comes directly after the February certification, not the October one. That is, the one that asked for and SHOULD have found emails from October 1 forward. So that is suspicious, at least IMO.
As to the other relevant details, I believe you can find them in this handy-dandy timeline post.;-p Some guy named Jeff helped me put it together.
I see most of the October details are in that timeline. But at least GX 52 is pretty interesting, no? A September 30 email from Addington to others in OVP that DoJ had in its possession as of October 3 – an email from the period of the gap. And note that GX 52 did not come from OVP, but from DoJ itself.
I don’t know. I don’t think Addington would have turned over the email for discovery (because he had faxed it), and we know there WERE a few other emails from the period, which were printed out beforehand, so Fitz had other ways of knowing there HAD been emails sent during that period and also–since he got some emails dated during that period, no reason to note a gaping hole in teh evidence turned over, because he HAD gotten some stuff from that period.
Wait. Maybe I take that back> I thought we had one email dated during this period that was turned over in October. Am I imagining that?
Not that I am aware of.
There had to be some doc production request that included the period subsequent to September 30, 2003; if not the one you refer to here, then one prior to or subsequent thereto. and there is a continuing duty to make best efforts to produce anything relevant that is not included in your initial response. You telling me that there is nothing that would impose a direct duty for the period subsequent to September 30?
I will just add that I find it almost impossible to believe that Addington himself would have done something like delete emails. Interpret requests and subpoenas in the most legalistic, narrow fashion possible, within an inch of the law, yes. But actually do old-fashioned criminal activity like delete email, perhaps even on behalf of his boss the VP, I find next to impossible to believe.
I can understand this, but Libby is/was a lawyer too and see where this stuff got him.
It may be that Deadeye has a certain fondness for attorneys who, what shall I say, are willing to join him on The Dark Side.
the February certification, not the October one. That is, the one that asked for and SHOULD have found emails from October 1 forward. So that is suspicious, at least IMO.
Is that suspicious because if they had done their own individualized searches it might have turned up emails that had been scrubbed from what a centralized search would go after? I mean, wouldn’t they just have scrubbed their own areas too? Indeed, wouldn’t it look more suspicious if they had done their own searches?
It’s suspicious because it’s of dubious acceptability to just pawn off your search on someone else like that (we know Martin didn’t do so), it puts the search into the vagaries of email searches (such as Addington’s proposed one that excluded “Judy Miller” and “Matt Cooper,” rather than human judgment which would have required those to be turned over, and if they knew a centralized search was going to be on the things that got disappeared–that is, the .PST files–then it means they wouldn’t come up on a computerized search.
One more thing. We don’t know whether there were emails responsive to the first subpoena that weren’t turned over. While we know there were NO emails for the 9/30-10/6 period, we don’t know if an earlier period (say, 7/8-7/12) had fewer than expected emails turned over.
But we do know that Mayfield pawned hers and Libby’s February search onto Addington, and we know that there were emails that were responsive that did not turn up.
we know that there were emails that were responsive that did not turn up.
No doubt. All I’m saying is that there’s not anything suspicious per se about leaving it to Addington and a centralized search, at least in the sense you are suggesting. Indeed, if there’s anything suspicious about it to me it’s that it conspicuously takes the email search out of the direct control of the immediate actors which looks more innocent. I mean, if they had done the search themselves, wouldn’t you be saying that looked suspicious?
We may be talking about “suspicious” in different ways.
1) Was it suspicious to Fitz that Mayfield did not certify her own (and Libby’s) email discovery. Yes. Because that does not ACTUALLY fulfill the requirements of the discovery.
2) Would the fact that she did so alert suspicions regarding the completeness of the email discovery? Maybe after a time, if, say, Martin’s emails showed up, but they didn’t get turned over by Jenny. But, as you say, at that point it would make Jenny (and Libby) less suspect, bc they hadn’t done their search themselves.
3) Does it look suspicious in retrospect, now that we know that the emails disappeared along with the logs? Is it reason to suspect Mayfield’s and Libby’s emails were deliberately suppressed. Absolutely. Because it was abnormal not to do a search (unless for some reason DOJ agreed that that would become the norm–though we know other people from OVP DID their own searches). And because in not doing the search, you made it easier to carry out the obstruction of the investigation.
It’s totally suspicious! They’re not actually being asked to “search” in any technical way; they’re just being asked to remember and sign off attesting to good faith. It betrays a bad conscience that she palmed off the “search”.
Ok, I get it.
So if I’m not mistaken, in fall 2003, Libby did not leave his email search to the centralized one, while Mayfield did – for the period covering the events of summer 2003 and up to September 30, 2003. Then, in early 2004 both Libby and Mayfield left their email searches to the centralized search, when the subpoenas covered the period including October 2003.
Ok, that does look suspicious, and must have looked like it required an explanation since no one else in OVP seems to have done that.
Yes, that would seem to be the conventional wisdom. And little did they know that letting Addington do it was jumping from the frying pan into the fire. *g*
Sh*t. I just realized the answer might be under my nose.
While at a former Fortune 100 company in IT, I had staff members that rotated in and out of Exchange support doing mundane record changes that happened with attrition.
If a user quit, retired or was fired, their .PST was HIDDEN. Their emails remained in the system, the .PST was still there, but a flag was turned off on the account so that it was invisible in the respect that it no longer appeared as an active account. They also changed the directory entry, but that was a separate operation.
They still had to set a flag, though — a filled-in field, if you will.
We didn’t delete the .PST or the emails, though, in case there were legal issues that demanded documentation at a later date.
** HIDDEN FILES **
Rayne, you beat me to it. Yet no one has commented about the point you are making. I’ll offer more detail; this info is in the public domain, on the Web, and in computer manuals, so it’s not a big secret.
Suppose I have two directories: attaboy and _#%attaboy. I do a search for all files containing the term… ‘judyjudy‘.
On Mar 1, I might get a list of the following directory and the following files:
attaboy/folder1/judyjudy.doc
attaboy/folder1/pics/judyjudy.jpg
I think that only one judyjudy file exists on that machine.
That is because the % in the directory (or file) prefix of any filename or directory name tells the computer, ‘don’t bug me by showing me these, I want to ignore them for the present. HIDE them.’ But if I remove the % from the _#%attaboy, what will happen?
On March 20th, suppose that I alter the directory name _#%attaboy by removing the % so that it is now called _#attaboy. I’ve removed the % character that was used to HIDE the directory — and hide all the files within that directory.
(”Hiding” is sort of like ‘moving stuff to the back of the closet where I don’t have to deal with it’. As Rayne points out, my ass is covered (legally) because I have not deleted anything. However, ‘hiding files’ saves me time, because I can ignore files and directories that I don’t need to waste time viewing. It also **hugely** reduces the chances that I will accidentally overwrite a file, which is another big advantage of hiding files!)
Now, with the _#attaboy directory “VISIBLE”, I redo the search and now — presto! — look what appears:
attaboy/folder1/judyjudy.doc
attaboy/folder1/pics/judyjudy.jpg
_#attaboy/sleazebots/printreporters/judyjudy.doc
_#attaboy/sleazebots/sleeziest/judyjudy.mov
…
You get the idea.
EW, given that you grew up in an IBM household, I’d assumed you hide files all the time to get ‘em out of your way… Apparently not?
As Rayne points out, ‘hidden files’ would explain why emails were sometimes found; other times, they did not turn up. At least on the (UNIX and Mac OS and Win) systems that I’ve used, files ONLY show up when the files are ‘viewable’.
(Feature; not a bug.)
—————————–
** Addington RE: Ausberger’s (a form of Autism), @ 97, 42, 56, 65, 71 **
I’m in no way qualified to diagnose anyone for anything, so let me point out that I am NOT arguing that Addington has an ‘autism thing going on’. But with that caveat, there are some interesting things that keep cropping up in relation to his name. And they often remind me of some experiences interacting with people diagnosed as autistic.
Like others here, I’ve wondered whether some autistic traits/limitations might help explain the kinds of behavior ascribed to David Addington (little – or ‘flat’ – emotion; very legalistic, very focused on procedures, doesn’t interact with the press/public).
Autistics in general are characterized by an inability to read other people’s emotions. They tend to take things quite literally — allusions, metaphors, similes simply baffle them. (katiejacob can perhaps verify or fine-tune my remarks; Asberger’s is one type of autism, IIRC.)
To anyone who’s never observed autistic kids, it’s worth noting that they don’t play like other kids. (In my experience, they also avoid making eye contact, and if they do make eye contact it is very fleeting.) Most kids will look you in the eye, chat with you, and ‘play’ in novel ways. Most kids will pick up a small note pad and use it as a ‘PDA’ to play Mommy or Daddy. Or they’ll pretend that their shoe is a phone; they’ll hold it up to their ear and chat happily away into the shoelaces, using lots of emotion that mimics what they’ve heard their parents or caregivers say. They’ll hold a ‘tea party’ and feed a nickel (ie, a ‘pretend cookie’) to their teddy bear by putting the nickle up to it’s mouth, then talking to the teddy bear in very emotive language: “Do you LIKE that? Yum! Yummmmy!!”
But not autistic kids. They can be very sweet, and they can have high IQs. (Yes, some autistics go to college.) But I have not observed the autistic kids that I’ve watched ever use a shoe as anything BUT a shoe. For these kids, a shoe is a shoe is a shoe is a shoe is a shoe… A nickel is a nickel; it could never be a ‘cookie’, NOT EVEN for a teddy bear. The kids that I’ve interacted with (and also adults) tend to have ‘flat’ voices, lack animation, and almost always lacking the auditory rhythms in which most kids speak.
It is also now evident that people can fall anywhere along a scale for autism; it’s not a black/white thing. There are degrees of autism. (I think katiejacobs will bear me out?). Research now suggests that autism happens really, really early in the process of infant development during gestation — before the sixth month IIRC. The way the brain forms, and the timing in which the neurological factors that manifest as autism develop, happen in a ‘window’ of time and the earlier in that window they occur, the more severe the autism seems to be. (Anyone interested, here’s a good preliminary link: http://www.sciam.com/article.c…..414B7F0000
I remember reading the Libby Trial Liveblog threads and thinking… “Is it possible that a highly functioning person with ’some autism thing’ going on is actually operating the reins of government….?!” Because — on the face of it — most of us would assume that a ‘mind blind’ person would not be hired as the CoS for a VP. On the other hand, someone who takes things very literally, is very focused, doesn’t ‘goof off’, thinks very rigidly within the box could have a certain sort of…. value?… to an administration that doesn’t like to be questioned.
EWs descriptions of Addington sounded as if his voice was very ‘flat’. Not a lot of emotional limberness. (About what one might expect of someone who is interpreting laws and legal codes with RIGID, very ’surface level’ black/white sterility.) But if Addington is very ‘procedural’ and ‘unemotional’, that’s a red flag.
To assume that someone with autism is ‘not smart’ is erroneous. I actually interacted for an extended period of time with someone who was just… ‘mind blind’. (Absolutely inflexible; interpreted every document and presentation literally. He hated ‘literature’, because he didn’t see anything of interest in it.)
Autistics interpret information — including text! — literally. People who read here are familiar with ‘layers’ of text: there’s a ’surface layer’, and then (depending on the nature of the writing) there are one or more ‘layers’ beneath that surface text.
I’ve actually worked with a few autistics, trying to scope out HOW they read. They read THE SURFACE ONLY. They literally don’t grasp any ‘deeper meanings,’ and if you ask them ‘what’s beneath those words you just read me?’… well, one kid literally picked his book up off the desk and lifted it up so he could LOOK UNDER IT, trying to find what I had surely hidden there as a surprise for him. (katiejacob, perhaps you’ve had plenty of those moments when you really don’t know whether to laugh or cry, so you do some of each?)
If Addington were somewhat autistic (functional, can hold a job, excellent employee, does EXACTLY what he’s asked to do…) then Jeff @ 71 is almost certainly correct in guessing that Addington wouldn’t think to do anything illegal of his own accord. (Think Forrest Gump in the power of Dick Cheney, just to get your head around the notion.)
I’m not making a case that Addington should not be held accountable. I don’t mean that.
But if Addington has any significant degree of autism going on, then it would not surprise me in the slightest if he was told to search for “Judy” and that is EXACTLY what he searched for — Capital J, little u, little d, little y. Nothing more. Nothing less. Because that’s what I’d expect someone with the kind of ‘mind blindness’.
They would no more think to ask, “Well, shouldn’t I also search on Jud*, judy, jude, and any nicknames?” It literally would not occur to them. They don’t think ‘outside the box’ because they don’t even have a clue they’re IN a box! No clue.
IF (and ONLY IF) that kind of super-literalist, procedurally obsessed thought process is Addington’s ‘cognitive style’, then it speaks volumes about the depravity of R.B. Cheney. Someone who takes instructions literally, obsesses on their job, has few social skills and no discernable empathy, is focused on procedures, and views only ’strong patrons’ as legitimate sources of authority would be the perfect Cheney tool.
Whether that describes Addington is still not fully clear to me.
katiejacob, it sounds like you have some heroic parenting under your belt.
The incidence of autism is rising, and researchers would sure like to figure out why.
Maybe a reformatting of Crippen’s response explains this most simply.
Addington has assholism, defined as talking a bunch of shit and talking to everyone like they’re four years old and just don’t get it.
Exactly.
Is this the field that “SIS” filled?