They Do It All The Time. Check out these two idiots. First, they obviously chopped off Mr. Butterworth's statement. No IT in his right mind would believe that these emails won't be recovered. Even if an army combed through the all the records, traced the path of each and every email, and then deleted each one, there would still be a record of the deletions. Do these reporters really think that everyone KR sent an email to and everyone they forwarded their emails to has securely deleted the email trail? They certainly must realize that any deletions using a secure method would obviously prove that KR is lying about deleting the emails by mistake. As the expert says, even secure deletions can be recovered.

Reputable corporation and intellegient users routinely back up their files.

It's possible the RNC regularly destroys their backups. However, that would be extremely unusual and alone would generate huge suspicion in the mind of any IT or forensics professional. There's simply no good reason to destroy a backup. . . . The only reason to destroy backups is to destroy evidence.

Come to think of it, do you really think that Bush's Brain isn't keeping a record?

Those Rovian e-mails aren't lost or permanently deleted. They represent huge bucks in the form of notes for his multi-million dollar memoirs and 'job insurance' against anyone who thinks they can dump him overboard. Nope, Karl Rove has a copy of every one of his e-mails on a hard drive or CD disc at home.

If he wants to get rid of any traces on his computer, there are data logs and copies of stuff all over his computer. Good luck getting rid of the evidence. Forensic specialists find lost data all the time.

One e-mail is easy to find—you go into the e-mail file and there it will be. Even if they erase the whole e-mail file once, just threw it in the trash and then deleted it, it would still be there and it would be easy to find for a data-recovery expert—best [if it's] a forensic data-recovery expert. When you erase something you’re basically just erasing the index to the document—the document is still there. And if they did a simple erase off the hard drive, beyond the trash, it’s easy to retrieve. Forensically you can do it where you get all the raw data and look through it. If you or I did it, it would look like one long text file, a printout a mile long. You’d have to go through it and cipher it and find the [keyword] you’re looking for. It’s all jumbled with code all around it so it’s not easy to do, [but] forensic software can do that easily.....

I can say a Fortune 100 company lost all their e-mail. We were able to recover it. It happens all the time: we get this panicked phone call from individuals and corporations [who say,] “Oh, my God, I lost an e-mail!” It’s hard to explain to people what I just told you. What they don’t understand is that it may look like it’s gone but it’s still there.

I'm thinking about Nixon's imperial presidency. Nixon kept tapes of everything he said becasue he really thought he was above the law and no one could touch him. History is repeating itself.

I googled "national security" this morning. The latest story is about Sri Lanka. The lack of questioning about bypassing the WH mail server is an outrage.  ¶ 7:39 AM