RNC emails disappear - Do electronic shredders make a noise?

I would assume this is why one of the definitional elements in the recent subpoenas issued by John Conyers is that the electronic documents subpoenaed must contain all header and addressing information.

Some White House staff wrote e-mail messages about official business on Republican Party accounts, and some may have been wrongly deleted, the administration said on Wednesday in an embarrassing disclosure tied to the probe into the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

The White House said it could not rule out the possibility that some official e-mails relating to the firings had been deleted and are lost.

So, maybe Conyers will at least be able to establish some of the communications that are missing.

However, the key communications, those between the state level political operatives and White House political flacks, Rove, Miers, etc, may well be lost.

(And, yes, there's a big issue regarding the Presidential Records Act.)

More: Politico - "The Crypt also wasn't invited to a private White House briefing on the situation given to some reporters, but I know the general gist of the situation, and it's really bad for the White House."

And, From within a longer and more thorough AP piece,

Before 2004, for instance, e-mails to and from the accounts were typically automatically deleted every 30 days along with all other RNC e-mails. Even though that was changed in 2004, so that the White House staffers with those accounts were excluded from the RNC's automatic deletion policy, some of their e-mails were lost anyway when individual aides deleted their own files, Stanzel said.

He could not say what had been lost, and said the White House is working to recover as many as they can. The White House has now shut off employees' ability to delete e-mails on the separate accounts

So, reading between the lines, if the only way for emails to go missing since 2004 was for a user to delete them, and if the White House admits emails are missing, isn't that also an admission that somebody deleted emails? Who and when?

Is this an oblique admission of sombody's effort at coverup?

Later: ThinkProgress links to a subscription National Journal piece claiming Pat Leahy is going to request a "raft of subpoenas" tomorrow.

Thursday Morning: The WaPo adds this,

Administration officials said they could offer no estimate of how many e-mails were lost but indicated that some may involve messages from White House senior adviser Karl Rove, whose role in the firings has been under scrutiny by congressional Democrats.

And, the LATimes says it could be thousands of messages from 50 White House aides.

And, "The White House has informed congressional investigators that it will not be able to meet the committee's deadline of Friday to turn over the communications."