What Happened To The Emails?

Scott Horton addresses yesterday's NYT editorial on the OPR report:

[T]he Times zeroes in on what strikes me as the fishiest part of the whole DOJ ethics escapade: the “disappearance” of John Yoo’s and Patrick Philbin’s emails. Emails at an institution like the Justice Department don’t just “disappear.” Someone deleted them. Moreover, for a deletion to be effective enough to avoid an investigation, extraordinary steps have to be taken. In a criminal investigation (as should have taken place), this would have been an act of criminal obstruction. What’s out there that they don’t want us to see?

He also attended today's Senate hearing. Yoo's and Philbin's emails could have been recovered, as Goldsmith's were. So why weren't they?

At a minimum, it appears that the Justice Department did not exert itself in any way to retrieve these emails. Is this because seniors at Justice, like Mukasey, Filip, and Margolis, disapproved of the OPR investigation and wanted to hamper it? It may well be that OPR was left to its own resources and collected emails only to the extent that lawyers within the department elected to cooperate with it. We know that Attorney General Ashcroft set a benchmark within the Department by refusing such cooperation, for instance. It may all really be a question of political will, not technological ability.

Daphne Eviatar was there as well.