FBI Asked To Investigate White House E-Mail
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WASHINGTON — An ethics advocacy group asked the FBI yesterday to investigate the White House e-mail controversy, saying electronic messages about the Valerie Plame affair may have been destroyed.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington is basing its request on a White House document describing an effort to recover a week’s worth of missing email in 2003 from the office of Vice President Cheney.
The missing e-mail was from a week around the time the Justice Department had begun a criminal investigation into who in the Bush administration leaked Ms. Plame’s CIA identity to reporters.
White House technicians eventually retrieved e-mail from the missing week, but it is unclear whether all the e-mail from Mr. Cheney’s office that week has been found.
Mr. Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was convicted of perjury, obstruction, and lying to the FBI in the Plame inquiry.
An investigation is warranted because of the unexplained disappearance of an entire week’s worth of e-mails from Cheney’s office while the Justice Department was investigating top White House officials, according to CREW.
The request was outlined in a letter from the group to FBI Director Robert Mueller.
