Mullings by Rich Galen | Issue for March 24, 2000

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Maybe He Spilled Iced Tea on the Keyboard

Friday, March 24, 2000

A few weeks ago it became known that thousands of e-mails created on, or sent to, the White House computer system were not produced in response to subpoenas from the independent counsel's office or the U.S. Congress.

Yesterday, the U.S. Justice Department - which has not exactly been a picture of zealotry in its efforts to get to the bottom of possible illegal activities by the Vice President of the United State Albert Gore - announced it had opened a criminal investigation into the matter.

To briefly review the bidding, e-mails are archived. Just because they are deleted from a computer screen, doesn't mean they aren't backed up somewhere. A few weeks ago a White House counsel said, in a letter, that a perfectly-understandable-human-coulda-happened-to-anyone-mistake had been made and as many as 100,000 e-mails had not been scanned to see if they fell under one or more subpoenas.

Two employees of Northrup Grumman who worked in the White House and who discovered that the e-mails had been missed, said recently they were told by Administration employees that "there is a jail cell with your names on it" if they told anyone about it.

Now, the latest. Guess who's e-mails are missing. Hillary's? No. They are in the same secret place where the Rose Law Firm billing records were kept and a wave of a magic wand can make them appear like an owl delivering a letter at Hogwarts. Bill's? No. They are in that little alcove off the Oval Office where he often went to, um, multitask. The e-mails which are missing - nearly all of them - are from the office of Al "I-Invented-E-Mail-Exactly-One-Day-After-I-Invented-The-Internet" Gore.

Gore, remember, told us that at the meeting where the event at the Buddhist Temple was being discussed he had missed the part where someone said it was a fundraiser because he had been drinking a lot of iced tea, so had to - you know - leave the room a lot.

Don't be at all surprised, given the success of what was dubbed in Mullings last week as the "Iced Tea Defense" if we find out the Veep's iced tea jones often hit while he was tapping out e-mails and all too often when he had to - you know - leave the room, he hit the iced tea with his elbow knocking it onto the keyboard and rendering the e-mails unreadable and therefore not subject to subpoena.

Completely out of the control of any legal authority.

Here's my new rule of the internet: If you want to generate a lot, A LOT of e-mails, write a column about guns.

Remember how Al "I-Didn't-Invent-Soft-Money" Gore made a big deal about banning soft money from his campaign if George W. Bush would do the same? And Bush refused? Here was the lead paragraph of a New York Times article by Leslie Wayne yesterday: "Now that they have triumphed over the tobacco industry, trial lawyers have found a new target, Gov. George W. Bush, and they have been spending huge amounts of money from the tobacco settlement to keep him and other Republicans from being elected."

Hey, Al? How does this no-soft-money-on-either-side thing work again?

Here is an interesting lesson in political correctness. In a wire store headed: "Brains Differ in Navigation Skills" the lead was as follows: "Chalk one up for the Y chromosome: According to a new study, guys who get lost can often find their way out of unfamiliar places better than gals." If the study had shown the opposite results do you think the words men and women would have been used instead of guys and gals? Who wrote this, Nathan Detroit?

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