Has Patrick Fitzgerald Obtained A Silver Bullet Against Alberto Gonzales?

by Steve

We haven’t been following the Plame case lately because Patrick Fitzgerald has been busy nailing Conrad Black, and because Scooter’s attorneys have been engaged in a discovery process trying to get Fitzgerald to release as much of his evidence as Judge Reggie Walton will require to Scooter’s side. But today a letter from Fitzgerald back to Scooter’s attorneys from late last month surfaced (from where, Fitz’s office?), wherein Fitzgerald responds to the request for evidence by dropping a bombshell that has an obvious objective and target:

We are aware of no evidence pertinent to the charges against defendant Libby which has been destroyed.

First off, why did Libby’s attorneys even ask Fitzgerald about whether or not he knew if evidence, presumably at the White House, had been destroyed?

"In an abundance of caution, we advise you that we have learned that not all email 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 achiving process on the White House computer system."

So after Fitzgerald says he is aware of no evidence pertaining to the charges against Libby that has been destroyed, he then puts it out there that he knows, somehow, that some of the emails inside Bush and Cheney’s offices were not preserved as they were supposed to be. Given that none other than one Alberto Gonzales at the time was in charge of advising the White House staff to preserve such evidence, and it was Mr. Gonzales who waited a critical twelve hours to issue the directive in 2003 after he was informed by Justice to do so, it is possible that Fitzgerald has just told Libby’s folks that he has nothing to help Libby with the relatively limited charges that were filed against him, but he has a hell of a lot to tell the grand jury about emails that he knows about that somehow didn’t make their way from Gonzales officially to Fitzgerald.

Read the summaries by Georgia10 at DailyKos, and ReddHedd at FireDogLake.