Help me find email needles in the doc-dump haystack!
e pluribus media has created an ocr-scanned repository of documents from the Justice Department document dump that has been delivered over the last two days. TPM has links to the original PDFs, and has solicited help from humble bloggers like you and me.
It’s a lot of paper to dig through, but the consensus so far seems to be that there isn’t much new here. In fact, much of it is already public record. However, some suspicious details are missing. A particularly significant gap might be what happened in the three weeks after Nov. 15 2006 (when Sampson sent email to Harriet Miers, asking her if the Presidential approval would be required for the prosecutor firing plan, and when that approval might happen) and before Dec. 7, when the plan went into action. And while there is lots of activity going on, it seems like most of it is unfocused at this point- people are trying to read stuff, just to get some kind of gestalt image of what all might be there.
I want to take a different tack with this post and the following comments. I think it’s very interesting that many of the emails in this dump were sent to or from domains outside the government’s chain of command. All of this communication is between government employees, but the email headers indicate that at least some of the people involved sent mail to and from other domains, like Yahoo or Hotmail.
I think this is interesting becuase there are rumors that people like Karl Rove have been using alternate email addresses instead of the “official” addresses they were assigned. An outside email address would allow a user to intentionally avoid the archiving and reporting requirements that would govern all communications from the Executive Office of the President. So if, say, the Senate Judiciary Committee decided to subpoena emails from EOP, they would miss all of the emails sent from kr@georgewbush.com.
There was a very detailed post up somewhere (I can’t find it now- ack!) last week detailing how, if this is actually going on, it’s probably illegal. I won’t rehash that here- it’s thoroughly discussed at TPM. What I want to do is to collect all of the email addresses that appear in all of the emails in this document dump in one place, so that when it comes time for Pat Leahy to subpoena Yahoo, he’ll know which accounts to ask for. It seems clear that if people were going out of their way to use a different account to send and recieve mail, to avoid reporting and archiving laws, those accounts are the ones we should look at first.
The format I’d like is this:
email_address@somewhere.com , First Last Name, date, page reference
but if we don’t have all the detail, just the address is probably a good start.
for example,
tasia_scolinos@yahoo.com, Tasia Scolinos, 3/4/07, 2-2 p. 49
kr@georgewbush.com, Karl Rove
sjennings@gwb43.com, Scott Jennings, 8/24/06, the first dump
I’m leaving school right now, but I’ll spend some time on this tonight and post more later.
