Fitzgerald Subpoenas - The Day Before They Were Due-the White House's email server crashed

[kpete]

Fitzgerald Subpoenas and Server Crashes
By: emptywheel Thursday June 18, 2009 8:35 am

CREW reports something that I demonstrated clearly some time ago: materials subpoenaed by Patrick Fitzgerald in his CIA Leak Investigation were lost in the White House's seemingly intractable problems with email. (h/t Laura Rozen) But CREW's got new documents proving the case, including this Microsoft Post-Mortem documenting its efforts to conduct an email search in February 2004, in what is almost certainly the series of subpoenas Fitz issued shortly after taking over the investigation (the date referred to in the post-mortem--January 22--is the date Fitz issued his subpoenas). Here's a summary of the key subpoenaed material:

*** February 6 was Abu Gonzales' deadline to turn third batch of documents over to DOJ, including "records on administration contacts with more than two dozen journalists and news media outlets." The journalists, with my best take of what the investigators were looking for in brackets, include:


Robert Novak, "Crossfire," "Capital Gang" and the Chicago Sun-Times
Knut Royce and Timothy M. Phelps, Newsday
Walter Pincus , Richard Leiby {background for profile], Mike Allen , Dana Priest and Glenn Kessler , The Washington Post
Matthew Cooper , John Dickerson , Massimo Calabresi , Michael Duffy and James Carney , Time magazine
Evan Thomas, Newsweek
Andrea Mitchell , "Meet the Press," NBC
Chris Matthews <"your wife is fair game">, "Hardball," MSNBC
Tim Russert , Campbell Brown , NBC
Nicholas D. Kristof , David E. Sanger and Judith Miller , The New York Times
Greg Hitt and Paul Gigot , The Wall Street Journal
John Solomon, The Associated Press
Jeff Gannon , Talon News
...................................


Remarkably (well, not really), the day before this subpoena was due, the White House's email server crashed:

On 2/5/04, the EOPRM server's drives crashed and caused the server to bluescreen at bootup.


MORE:
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/06/18/fitzgerald-subpoenas-and-server-crashes/