Pacific Free Press was launched in March 2007 by Dutch-Canadian Richard
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands along with Chris Cook- CFUV radio journalist and Editor in Chief of Pacific Free Press. Cook is based in , Victoria, British Columbia.
The site is a sister to Atlantic Free Press and Brick Ogden an American Expatriate in Amsterdam has been a key supporter of this project.
The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
Forgotten Crimes: The Other Scandal Involving Destruction of Evidence
The Other Scandal Involving Destruction of Evidence
by Scott Horton I just finished poring over yet another set of written answers from a former senior Justice Department official who—extremely unconvincingly—insists over and again that he “has no present recollection” of communications between the White House and figures in the Justice Department about a series of matters which have Karl Rove’s fingerprints all over them.
However, the incessant stonewalling by the Justice Department is, if anything, actually exceeded in its outrageousness by the White House, which has issued a steadily lengthening series of contradictory explanations.
The emails were “accidentally” deleted. Then apparently they
weren’t. Then the emails were mostly on servers of the Republican
National Committee. And the White House then told us, in one of a great
many utterly preposterous legal claims, that information on Republican
National Committee servers were subject to claims of Executive
Privilege.
From
another perspective, however, that was just right: for the last seven
years the Executive Branch has been fused with the Republican Party. It
perfectly matched the vision of a totalitarian state.
However, the Associated Press’s Pete Yost, reports that a federal
judge has decided to stop simply taking the parade of White House
whoppers, and is demanding action:
A federal magistrate
ordered the White House on Tuesday to reveal whether copies of possibly
millions of missing e-mails are stored on computer backup tapes. The
order by U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola comes amid an effort by
the White House to scuttle two lawsuits that could force the Executive
Office of the President to recover any e-mail that has disappeared from
computer servers where electronic documents are automatically archived.
Two federal laws require the White House to preserve all
records including e-mail. Facciola gave the White House five business
days to report whether computer backup tapes contain e-mails written
between 2003 and 2005.
The “disappearance” of the White House
emails—which includes not only thousands of emails from Karl Rove and
his team, but also from Vice President Cheney and his team—were
discovered by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald when he started
investigating the outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, undertaken
with the direction and coordination of Cheney himself.
The
judge’s order can be viewed here. Don’t expect White House compliance,
however. Expect still more dodges and a hundred further variations on
“the dog ate my homework.” That’s the kind of White House we’re dealing
with. And the Department of Justice will not be pursuing justice. As
usual, it will be playing partisan political guerrilla warfare and
doing everything in its power to obstruct justice.
The
nation’s attention right now is focused on the affair of the destroyed
torture tapes. That also leads straight into the White House. Four
senior White House lawyers were involved in the decision-making and
one—probably Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, David
Addington–aggressively advocated destruction of the evidence in the
face of court orders. However, the destruction of the internal email
traffic is potentially even more important. It provides likely evidence
of the abusive manipulation of the mechanics of the criminal justice
system by the White House.
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