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White House emails retrieved from Bush administration records reveal that top Bush Justice Department officials circulated a memo falsely blaming Al Gore for U.S. failure to get Osama bin Laden. The apocryphal Osama-Al Gore-Oliver North story, already debunked on snopes.com, was forwarded internally to administration personnel by David M. Israelite, Deputy Chief of Staff and Counselor to Attorney Gen. John Ashcroft .
The existence of such politicized emails may help explain why millions of emails sent to and from the previous White House have gone missing despite rules for preserving presidential records. This particular email, spreading a bogus rumor, has not been reported before.
Justice counselor David Israelite forwarded the Snopes-worthy narrative to colleagues in
Ashcroft's office Jan. 23, 2002. Headed "For you historians" and "Do you remember?" it purports to describe a 1987 video clip from Col. Oliver North's congressional testimony in the Iran-Contra hearings. According to this anonymous narrative -- which first surfaced in Nov. 2001 and has survived repeated debunking to recur periodically -- North warned senators about Osama bin Laden in his testimony but was ridiculed and shut down by then-Sen. Al Gore.
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