White house wiped important emails

2 Feb 2006 | 07:39 GMT

By Nick Farrell

KEY emails penned by Vice President Dick Cheney to his now disgraced former chief aide Lewis (Scooter) Libby were deleted contrary to White House policy, it's alleged.

Libby is facing charges relating to his role in exposing the identity of a CIA operative. The Bush administration outed Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. Plame's husband Joe Wilson was a diplomat sent to Niger in 2002 to see whether the African regime sold uranium to Iraq. At the time the sexed up uranium story was used by the Americans as part of its justification to attack Iraq.

Libby claims that important email evidence which is vital to his defence should be in the hands of investigators looking into the leak.

However, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald says he has not got them "because of an e-mail archiving problem" at the White House.

According to Associated Press, Fitzgerald said that not all e-mail of the Office of Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system.

Readers might notice similarities to the "archiving problem" that President Nixon suffered with his tape recorder during the Watergate investigation.

More at the NY Daily News, here. µ

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