Thursday, July 21, 2005

Now this is interesting.

Here's a little tidbit about Ari Fleischer's role in the whole Rove thing: two of his press gaggles have been removed/overwritten from the White House web site. The relevant comment, from that site:

The July 9, 2003, gaggle link that scott1121 posted does not, at the moment, lead to the gaggle of that date but rather to "The Rights and the Aspirations of the People of Afghanistan." It has the look of something which was just overwritten on the file for July 9 (20030709-1.html).

There is no reference to a gaggle for July 9 or July 10 in the White House Press Briefing archive.

On searching further I find the following: the form of the file naming in the folder whitehouse.gov/news/releases/ is 2003/07/20030709-x.html where x is issued sequentially. The largest numbered file for July 9 is -11. What is interesting is that the -1 file appears to have been overwritten by the -4 file and the -2 file is missing giving only a 404 error message. The -11 file has also been overwritten with a prewar message from October 3, 2002.

If these deletions and overwrites are recent, and it appears that the disappearance of the July 9, 2003, gaggle is recent, there must be some scrambling going on for some reason or other.

Is that a rat I smell?


One of them shows that Ari has seen not only the INR memo, but also the CIA summary of Wilson's trip to Niger. Hmm, could there have been more than one copy on Air Force 1?

Posted by crimnos @ 8:30 PM