[lit-ideas] Re: Millions & millions (I can hear Sagan say it)...

  • From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 10:28:19 -0700

When the news popped up in Google, a bunch of us were standing around and saw that; one person immediately said "Quattrone!" and we all laughed. Yep, it's Quattrone again.


How? It's not easy to delete five million emails. It requires a systematic 
action.

Why? To destroy evidence.

This is exactly what Frank Quattrone did.

He was one of the top investment bankers in Silicon Valley for Credit Suisse. He brought dozens of companies to IPO, producing billions of dollars in market cap, and earned $160m per year.

But he also used insider trading, bribes, payoffs, and lots of illegal actions. Credit Suisse was basically a criminal organization. When the Feds got on his tail, Quattrone ordered his staff to delete emails. They spent days at deleting everything.

For this, he was convicted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Quattrone

Whoever ordered the deletion of the White House emails did it for the same reason: to destroy evidence of criminal acts.

It's illegal to delete White House emails. The article below makes this point:

"The biggest problem here is really that here is a White House that is deliberately violating an existing statute that requires them to preserve all records," said Sloan. "And we have significant evidence now both from the RNC e-mail and the White House e-mail that are missing that the White House was using every means possible to avoid complying with the law."

This is clearly criminal and impeachable.

yrs,
andreas
www.andreas.com


----- Original Message ----- From: <JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, April 13, 2007 11:50 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Millions & millions (I can hear Sagan say it)...


_Click  here: White House: Millions of e-mails may be missing - CNN.com_
(http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/04/13/white.house.email/index.html)


WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Millions of White House e-mails may be missing,  White
House spokeswoman Dana Perino acknowledged Friday.
"I wouldn't rule out that there were a potential 5 million e-mails lost,"
Perino told reporters.
The administration was already facing sharp questions about whether top
presidential advisers including Karl Rove improperly used Republican National
Committee e-mail that the White House said later disappeared.
The latest comments were a response to a new report from a liberal watchdog
group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), alleging
that over a two-year period official White House e-mail traffic for hundreds
of  days has vanished -- in possible violation of the federal Presidential
Records  Act. (_Watch CREW's comments on the missing messages_
(javascript:cnnVideo('play','/video/politics/2007/04/13/henry.wh.rove.emails.cnn','2009/04/12');)

(javascript:cnnVideo('play','/video/politics/2007/04/13/henry.wh.rove.emails.cnn','2009/04/12');) )
"This story is really now a two-part issue," CREW's Melanie Sloan told CNN.
"First there's the use of the RNC e-mail server that's inappropriate by White
House officials and secondly we've also learned that there were between March
of  2003 and October of 2005 apparently over 5 million e-mail that were not
preserved and these are e-mail on the regular White House server."
Perino stressed there's no indication the e-mails were intentionally lost,
but she was careful not to dispute the outside group's allegations. "I'm not
taking issue with their conclusions at this point," Perino said. "We're
checking  into them. There are 1,700 people in the Executive Office of the
President."
White House: 'We screwed up'
Perino's disclosure about the White House e-mail comes a day after she
admitted that the White House "screwed up" by not requiring e-mails from
Republican Party and campaign accounts to be saved and was also trying to  
recover
those e-mails.
Perino said 22 aides in the political arm of the president's office use party
or campaign e-mail accounts, which were issued to separate official business
from political work. Some of those accounts were used to discuss the
December  firings of eight federal prosecutors, a shake-up that has triggered a
spreading  controversy on Capitol Hill.
Congressional investigators have questioned whether White House aides used
e-mail accounts from the Republican Party and President Bush's re-election
campaign for official government business to avoid scrutiny of those  dealings.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, accused
the White House of trying to hide messages on the Republican Party system
related to the firing of the U.S. attorneys, which has stirred up a hornet's
nest on Capitol Hill.
"You can't erase e-mails, not today," said Leahy, D-Vermont. "They've gone
through too many servers. They can't say they've been lost. That's like saying,
'The dog ate my homework.' " (_Watch Leahy compare e-mails to Nixon tapes_
(javascript:cnnVideo('play','/video/politics/2007/04/12/sot.leahy.missing.email.
cnn','2009/04/11');)
(javascript:cnnVideo('play','/video/politics/2007/04/12/sot.leahy.missing.email.cnn','2009/04/11');) )
Leahy said the e-mails would have remained on party or campaign computer
servers, and he compared the situation to the famous 18½-minute gap in one of
the Watergate tapes.
"They're there," he said. "They know they're there, and we'll subpoena them,
if necessary, and we'll have them."
Perino told reporters that the e-mails from those accounts should have been
saved, but said policy has not kept pace with technology. She said computer
experts were trying to retrieve any records that have been deleted.
"We screwed up, and we're trying to fix it," she told reporters.
E-mails sought by special prosecutor also missing
Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case, disclosed
last year that some White House e-mails in 2003 were not saved as standard
procedure dictated.
In a January 23, 2006, letter to the defense team of former White House aide
I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Fitzgerald wrote: "We advise you that we have
learned  that not all e-mail 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."
Robert Luskin, personal attorney for Rove, told CNN Friday that he "has no
reason to doubt" Fitzgerald's assertion that some White House e-mail was
missing.
"You're quite right," Luskin said in a telephone interview. "There was a gap
there."
Democrats charge this raises questions about whether the public has gotten
the full story on everything from the CIA leak case to the fired U.S. attorneys
controversy.
"The biggest problem here is really that here is a White House that is
deliberately violating an existing statute that requires them to preserve all
records," said Sloan. "And we have significant evidence now both from the RNC
e-mail and the White House e-mail that are missing that the White House was
using every means possible to avoid complying with the law."
Luskin said it was "foolish speculation" for CREW -- which serves as counsel
to former ambassador Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, in a private
suit  against Rove and other Bush officials -- to suggest that the gap in White
House  e-mail helped Rove avoid indictment in the CIA leak case. Luskin said
Fitzgerald  told him that Rove was cleared in the case because he "did nothing
wrong."
Luskin added that until this month, Rove believed his RNC e-mail was being
archived and did nothing wrong.
"Rove has always understood from very early on in the Bush administration
that RNC and campaign e-mail were being archived," said Luskin. "He was
absolutely unaware until very, very recently that any e-mails were lost. And he
never asked that e-mails be deleted or asked for the authority to delete  
e-mails."



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