473 days of missing emails; Missing without a trace.

From AP:

A White House chart shown to Congress indicates no e-mail was archived on 473 days for various units of the Executive Office of the President, a House committee chairman says.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., says a White House spokesman's comments suggesting no e-mail had disappeared conflicted with what congressional staffers were told in September. He also said the White House has refused to make the chart public.

Hmmm.. A chart??? Interesting.. And the WH said that they won't make the chart public.

From the CREW:

... when the problem was uncovered the White House Office of Administration created abundant documentation that included multiple estimates of the volume of missing email, not a single chart that the White House now suggests is the only documentation.

Here is the snippet of Fratto's press gaggle:

QUESTION: Could you address the missing White House e-mails in the lawsuit that was a subject of reports this morning?
Are, in fact, the e-mails missing? What's the likelihood of their recovery?

FRATTO: I think our review of this -- and you saw the court filing on this and our declaration and response to the judge's questions. I think, to the best of what all the analysis we've been able to do, we have absolutely no reason to believe that any e-mails are missing.

There's no evidence of that. There's no -- we tried to reconstruct some of the work that went into a chart that was entered into court records, and could not replicate that, or could not authenticate the correctness of the data in that chart.

And from everything that we can tell, our analysis of our back-up systems, we just -- we have no reason to believe that any e-mail, at all, are missing.

O.K. Fratto mentioned some draw out chart according to the court document... And what an interesting covered-up story with a perfectly timed court document and press gaggle. Here is the WH late court document:

Late last night [on January 15, 2008], the White House submitted a curious court filing (PDF) in the ongoing case over the 5 to 10 million emails, spanning 2003 to 2005, that have gone missing from its archives due to a "technical issue."

And why didn't the WH, EOP, EVP, or legal counsel Fred Fielding mentioned before to the public and to the Oversight and Reform Committee of a chart and anaylsis of the missing emails. Why? Because there is no chart or anaylsis!!!! This case looks, feels, and smells like Watergate all over again...