Missing White House E-Mails Traced

By GottaLaff

Presto! Magic! One day after a judge orders BushCo to search for millions of "missing" e-mails, poof! They appear. Just like that. Go figure:

A Justice Department lawyer told a federal judge yesterday that the Bush administration will meet its legal requirement to transfer e-mails to the National Archives after spending more than $10 million to locate 14 million e-mails reported missing four years ago from White House computer files.

Civil division trial lawyer Helen H. Hong [...] said the department plans to argue in a court filing this week that the administration's successful recent search renders the lawsuit moot. [...]

Hong said private contractors had helped find the e-mails by searching through an estimated 60,000 tapes that contain daily recordings of the entire contents of the White House computers as a precaution against an electronic disaster.

What would BushCo do without all those private contractors? But wait just a second there. Not so fast:

Meredith Fuchs, counsel for the other plaintiff, a historical group known as the National Security Archive, said, [...] "For the past year and a half, they said, 'Don't worry, don't worry, leave us alone.' Now they say, at the last minute, they have solved it. I want to see the evidence." [...]

Once the e-mails are transferred to the National Archives, federal law allows them to be requested under the Freedom of Information Act after a five-year interval.

Don't trust, but verify.