Years ago, an organization dedicated to honest and open government, Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW), began an effort to confront the Bush Adminisration about a group of missing White House emails related to a criminal investigation. It was almost two years ago that I wrote about the five-day deadline from a federal magistrate for George W. Bush to come clean about where those emails had gone to.
Did Bush comply with that judge’s order? Oh, heck – you know he didn’t. He just went on doing what he wanted, regardless of the process of the law, and no one in the legislative or judicial branches of government took any action to hold him accountable.
CREW stayed on the job, though, and yesterday, the fruit of their labors began to ripen. The group reached a legal settlement with the Obama Administration regarding the release of 94 days worth of emails that the Bush Administration claimed were missing, and could never be retrieved.. The emails will be sent to the National Archives and Records Administration for processing.
When will you be able to see those emails? It’s hard to say for sure. They’ll eventually be available under the Presidential Records Act, but that law allows for substantial delays. By the time we find out just what George W. Bush was covering up, the issues involved will probably be history.
What has already been discovered about these emails, however, indicates that people at the top level of the Bush Administration knew that emails were being destroyed, and did nothing about it. Remember that those emails were requested in relation to a criminal investigation of the Bush White House itself. That looks like a purposeful obstruction of justice to me.
Wait now for the oversight committees of the U.S. Congress to do…
…nothing.
