Reply #2: the timing of all of it is strange

[maddezmom]

Doan quits:
Doan Speaks, Envisions Victory Dance
By Matthew Blake 05/05/2008 03:10PM
On Friday, The New York Times had a pithy assessment of ousted GSA Administrator Lurita Doan: "She exits as a minor but revealing character in a far more sweeping tale of the partisan undermining of public service."

Well, it's not like Lurita Doan to take such swipes lying down. Today she fired back on the airwaves of Federal News Radio, giving an interview that was over-the-top even by Doan's standards. The news from the interview is that White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and Counsel Fred Fielding told Doan she had to go, because she was a "distraction." Here are some other highlights:

-On the New York Times: "I think Thomas Jefferson said it right. He said the most accurate thing in the newspapers are the advertisements." Doan says The Times is advancing the "seductive theory" that Doan was fired for violating the Hatch Act. The real reason, Doan says, (and this might be true) is her endless feud with GSA Inspector General Brian Miller.

- On the White House demanding her resignation: Doan describes it as "bizarre" and "absolutely surreal" meeting with White House officials who called her a "distraction to progress at GSA."


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=3299531&mesg_id=3299587

and then this:

White House tells court of missing emails from beginning of Iraq war

The White House has admitted in court that it has lost three months of email backups from the initial days of the Iraq war, raising questions about the possible deletion of politically sensitive records.

The disclosure came in a lawsuit filed by the National Security Archive, a non-profit group that specialises in uncovering classified documents.

The archive was told it could not receive emails relating to Iraq, despite a 30-year-old law requiring the preservation of presidential records, because a system upgrade had deleted up to 5m emails.

~snip~

The loss of White House emails also proved an obstacle to Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor investigating the leaked identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame.

Fitzgerald said in 2006 that he believed some potentially relevant emails sent by aides in vice president Dick Cheney's office were lost in the Bush administration's email system.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/07/usa.usforeignpolicy?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront