Don’t Try This At Home
CBS reports that Karl Rove’s attorney is spreading the talking point: E-Mail Deletion Unintentional
Karl Rove’s lawyer on Friday dismissed the notion that President Bush’s chief political adviser intentionally deleted his own e-mails from a Republican-sponsored computer system.
The attorney said Rove believed the communications were being preserved in accordance with the law.
“His understanding starting very, very early in the administration was that those e-mails were being archived,” Rove’s attorney, Robert Luskin, said.
Bovine excrement, Mr. Luskin. Don’t try to sell that at trial because it just won’t fly…actually it won’t even get to leave the terminal.
There are certain things you can do as a user on a network, and a hell of a lot you can’t do unless the system administrator makes changes. There are excellent reasons why you don’t allow users to delete things from servers, the main one being they can delete too many things and create problems. Users are allowed to “trash” their own limited space, but users must be given specific permission to take actions outside of their documents and settings.
Karl Rove would have had to request/order that permission, and apparently it wasn’t rescinded until 2005 when the RNC was looking at problems from “legal authorities” because Karl continued to do it after the RNC was told to stop deleting e-mail in 2004.
If Karl was such “a babe in the woods” when it came to e-mails, he wouldn’t have known to ask for/demand the permission.
Luskin is also trying to sell the “cluttered in-box” ploy. The e-mails you send aren’t in the “in-box”, and you have to do some clicking to see them. He was apparently deleting both the in-box and the copies of the e-mail he sent. There was nothing “unintentional” about it.
When users delete e-mail from their personal users area, they don’t see it in their e-mail program, but the e-mail exists on the server until the administrator deletes it. Karl wanted it gone, without waiting for the administrator to perform routine clean-up. This was a very deliberate action.
6 comments
I don’t buy it, do you?
Anybody who still believes these Keystone Kops on ANYTHING is either purposefully deluding themselves or bought-in up to their eyeballs and making some serious dividends from the illegalities performed on a daily basis by these motherfuckers.
Nixon looks like a level-headed PRO, compared to these arrogant little pus-wad frat-boy motherfuckers.
I wouldn’t have allowed it on a system I was responsible for. I didn’t give that kind of permission to others instructors or the Department Chairman when I administrated the system at the college where I was teaching. The system administrator is responsible for keeping the system up and running, you don’t let people delete things that you don’t know about.
This is probably a Microsoft webserver. They take forever to get back up when they crash. It was for the Rep National Committee, so you’ll have Senators and Representatives on your case if it’s down.
Rove had to have the permissions to do it. The permissions are a special request and variation from normal. Rove knew exactly what he was doing, and he used the RNC system specifically because he could delete all traces. There was nothing accidental or unintentional about it.
This is nothing more than the “dog ate my homework” excuse. IMHO, Rove did not in fact have delete permissions: those emails are still out there somewhere, and Rove and others are lying their f’ing asses off. With luck, someone will find copies of these emails, and they may prove to be the Nixon tapes, writ large.
Oh, and by the way: I have known too many people who suffer “BlackBerry thumb”; not one of them… not one… has ever been an ignoramus about technical matters. Not only do those emails exist somewhere; Rove knows they exist somewhere.
Pass the popcorn!
Even with permission he could only delete two of the four copies – with copies on the sender and recipient’s machines and the SMTP and POP servers, it requires a lot of time, work and knowledge to get rid of them.
Kove hasn’t done anything unintentionally since grade school.
Did anybody see that bullshit PARADE “magazine” in today’s paper, about how much people earn?
Yeah, Karl Rove supposedly makes $165,000+/- a year.
RIIIIIIIGHT.
That motherfucker’s worth as much as Dick Cheney, any fucking day.
He’s just hiding it all offshore, where he’ll never have to pay taxes on it.
He really does consider himself “above the law” — but what’s really gonna suck for him is when the shit really hits the fan, and old Karlikins is no longer “part of the family” for the Bushistas, and they let him take the heat as the servant that he’s always been, and they skip off to Dubai and avoid the prosecution that they have long deserved.
That’s his government salary, the amount on his W-2. His real money shows up on a Schedule B or D. the Shrubbery writes almost nothing and sends no e-mail. He knows better than to leave a paper trail. Remember, Abu Gonzo’s claim to his job is working to eliminate what trail existed.