Thinking out loud about Karl Rove's deleted e-mails

Who among us saves EVERY e-mail they receive at the office? Raise your hand if you do.

I note no hands are raised. Very good.

Karl Rove lives in an alternate universe. Democrats are all evildoers out to get him, he's done nothing wrong, the e-mails are just his normal working papers. Why save any of that stuff? He doesn't need it and neither will anyone else.

None of it's true, and you'd think he would have learned from Kenneth Starr's looking in Hillary's sock drawer that your political enemies want the damndest things, but...

at work is backed up and can be retrieved for decades. Seems KKKarl knew that too which is why he advocated the use of RNC servers for email. Problem with that is doing White House business on other servers is against the law since the law requires they be preserved.

want to happen with the email. Has everything to do with the email server AND the (likely) separate storage server that holds the email awaiting delivery. And the backup policies associated with each (and any intermediate email server and/or storage server). Most modern storage servers employ a technology called "snapshots" which allow a point in time capture of information on that server, that point in time "picture" is then (usually) backed up to alternate media or propagated to mirror servers. This is in addition to any backup and/or archiving policy at the email server. What you, the user, do (move an email to a "recycle bin" and then "empty the trash" (the so-called double delete mentioned by the twit doing the press briefing) has very little to do with whether or not the email can be retrieved.

And, except for spam, I've saved every email I've sent and received for the past 20+ years.

By default, most sent email is automatically archived by the sending email program (outlook for example). You have to go to effort to delete the sent email, and, like I explained, wherever that email landed, it has a very good chance of being archived and backed up (even the spam). Now, backups might not have everything, as backup tapes and other media are often recycled. But I suspect that much of the email sent IS saved in monthly backups and those tape sets are not recycled all that often (at least the usual retention period is a year for monthly "full saves" at most data centers). I believe the period of interest (as far as the USA firing scandal is concerned) is all within the last year (though there might be planning email more than a year old).

It's also the case that most email users do not create an email from whole cloth, but rather reply to an email originated by someone else... forming a thread of emails. One has only to find the last email in the thread to see all of the other emails from possibly months in the past.

And, he was SPECIFICALLY ORDERED to NOT destroy any more emails by Fitzgerald MONTHS ago and ignored an ORDER to preserve evidence.

What happened here is NOT just some normal maintenance and normal partisan paranoia. What we have here is a cover up of (probably multiple) illegal operations by the White House and the President's personal consigliere, and the deletion of the emails is open and obvious obstruction of justice and contempt of Congress.

I await the day with somewhat of a school kids glee.
burn that sucker and burn him good