February 15, 2006: Media Learns Gonzales Withholding White House E-Mails that May Prove Criminal Behavior by Cheney, Aides

The media learns that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has withheld White House e-mails from special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. If revealed, those e-mails may shed light on which White House officials were involved in leaking the identity of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson to a number of reporters. Sources close to the Fitzgerald investigation team say that the e-mails may have the potential to incriminate Vice President Dick Cheney, his aides, and/or other White House officials involved in leaking Plame Wilson’s identity to the press. The sources also say that Cheney, in his 2004 testimony before Fitzgerald’s prosecutors, may have lied when he said that neither he nor any of his aides were involved in the Plame Wilson leak, and the e-mails could prove that Cheney was dishonest in his testimony. The e-mails Gonzales is withholding contain references to Plame Wilson’s identity and CIA status, and information regarding the inability to find WMD in Iraq. They also contain suggestions as to how White House officials could respond to increasingly negative criticisms about their conduct of the war from Plame Wilson’s husband, Joseph Wilson. Gonzales, who was the senior White House counsel at the time of the leak, coordinated the White House’s response to the FBI’s investigation of the leak (see May 8, 2004); he and other White House attorneys spent two weeks screening e-mails turned over to his office by some 2,000 staffers. Gonzales told Fitzgerald in 2005 that he had no intention of turning over the e-mails, because they contained classified intelligence information about Iraq in addition to minor references to Plame Wilson. The sources say Gonzales cited “executive privilege” and “national security concerns” as the reasons for not turning over some of the correspondence. Fitzgerald believes that other e-mails were intentionally “shredded” or deleted by either Gonzales or other White House officials. Fitzgerald has informed the judge presiding over the investigation that e-mails from the offices of Cheney and President Bush have not been saved. In a letter to the defense team of former Cheney chief of staff Lewis Libby, Fitzgerald has written, “In an abundance of caution, we advise you that we have learned that not all e-mail of the Office of the 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.” [Truthout (.org), 2/15/2006] The Wall Street Journal will write that the e-mails have been in the Libby team’s possession since February 6 (see February 6, 2006).