What the President Meant to Say

"The prosecutor in the criminal case against Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff said in a Jan. 23 letter that not all e-mail was archived in 2003, the year the Bush administration exposed the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame."

Here's Wolf Blitzer on CNN yesterday with legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin.

"BLITZER: [W]hen I hear a story like this, it hearkens back, I remember, of course, some of those missing tapes during Watergate and the Nixon White House that evidence may have been destroyed. This may be totally, totally overreaching. There may be a simple explanation, but the fact that the prosecutor writes this letter saying what happened to this -- to these e-mails, that raises certain questions.

"TOOBIN: And certainly the Iran-Contra affair was based almost entirely on electronic messages, so-called prof notes sent between Oliver North and colleagues. They have been crucial evidence in all White House investigations. What happened to them? A lot of things get destroyed in the normal course of business. Why were the normal procedures not followed? As you point out, could be completely innocent. But we just don't know."

The news first broke yesterday, at the end of an article by James Gordon Meek in the New York Daily News.

"CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald collected 10,000 pages of documents - including the most sensitive terrorism memos in the U.S. government - from Vice President Cheney's office, he said in court papers released yesterday.

"Without serving any warrants in his probe of who outed CIA officer Valerie Plame, Fitzgerald even obtained censored copies of the President's Daily Brief, the supersecret CIA threat memo for President Bush.

"Now Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Cheney's disgraced former chief aide, is asking a court to force Fitzgerald to fork over all the documents to fight charges of perjury and lying to the FBI."

It was in that context that Meek reported: "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."

Also yesterday, Neil A. Lewis wrote in the New York Times: "Lawyers for I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, offered a detailed outline on Tuesday of Mr. Libby's likely defense to charges that he lied about his role in exposing the identity of a C.I.A. operative.

"In papers filed in federal court, the lawyers strongly suggested they would argue that if Mr. Libby's statements to investigators were untrue, it was a case of innocent confusion or faulty memory because of his preoccupation with weightier national security matters at the time."

Domestic Spying Watch

Eric Lichtblau writes in the New York Times: "The Bush administration is rebuffing requests from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee for its classified legal opinions on President Bush's domestic spying program, setting up a confrontation in advance of a hearing scheduled for next week, administration and Congressional officials said Wednesday."