Doc Dump and Emailing

There was another huge document dump last night regarding the Prosecutor Purge—3,000 pages of related documents; NYT coverage here—and some interesting things are already beginning to trickle out. Former Gonzo deputy Kyle Sampson (who resigned last Monday) expressed concern in an email "about one of the fired attorneys testifying before Congress. … Sampson indicated his concern over questions [Bud Cummins] would likely have to answer and advised against [testifying]. Some of the questions Sampson feared Cummins would have to answer were 'Did you resign voluntarily?' and 'Were you told why you were being asked to resign?' … The Justice Department replaced Cummins with an associate of White House political adviser Karl Rove."

Huh. Seems to me, there's no reason to be concerned about those questions if there are perfectly sound and reasonable answers.

Another interesting tidbit is that there "are no emails from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who reportedly does not use email." Well, my my my. Another top Bush administration official who doesn't use email. The ignorance of the internets in that joint is downright astounding. They need to call the Video Professor.

Or maybe it has something to do with Bush's profound paranoia about email. Maybe it's a top-down policy about which someone needs to ask the president, instead of pretending as per usual that he's just too damn dumb to know what's happening in his administration. Every blog in the lefty blogosphere should be asking two questions today—"Why do the president and many of his top staffers not use email?" and "Are they attempting to skirt the provisions of the Presidential Records Act?"—and posting this video.


[The full text of what he says about not using email at all is: "I tend not to email—not only tend not to email, I don't email, uh, because of, uh, the different record requests that could happen to a president. I don't want to receive emails, 'cause, you know, there's no telling what somebody would email me and it would show up as, uh, you know, part of some kind of a story that—and I wouldn't be able to say, 'Well, I didn't read the email'—'But I sent it your address; how can you say you didn't?' So, in other words, I'm very cautious about emailing."]

Seriously, this shit needs to be hung right around the Googler's neck. Between the outside email domains and the refusals to use email at all, it seems fairly suggestive of a criminal effort to maintain secrecy—and it emanated from the Oval Office.