Plame Gossip

There were a couple stories late yesterday on the Libby team fishing in the deep waters trying to get classified materials regarding Plame's undercover status(WaPo version here.) As I read somewhere else, I think this question of whether the CIA thought Plame was undercover was pretty much resolved as they were the ones who referred the outing to the Justice dept in the first place. If she wasn't NOC, the CIA wouldn't have referred the case. Duh!

But the interesting item today, came out of the NYDaily News, last paragraph.

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.

Don't really know what this means, but it's the first official(?) mention of electronic shredding of documents. And, as we all know, the shredder doesn't hide innocence.

Josh Marshall has it with Fitzgerald phrasing it like this(I haven't seen the letter yet.)

"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."

Just curious at this point. Atrios goes back to the original 12 hour delay by Gonzales and Card between their notification of the investigation and their freeze on all documents. 12 hours is alot of time to shred in this electronic age.

(Oh, and I left this off this post earlier. I think we're entering "conspiracy," I prefer "criminal conspiracy," territory here. Because the shredding of these emails had to involve at least two parties. Either Gonzales or Card telling someone, and then that someone or someones going around scrubbing the records.)

Rawstory has the letter(pdf), and it's a broad slap down of the information requests by the Libby defense. The only part that relates to the "missing emails" is the excerpt I have above.