Forked tongue

Nothing to see here.

The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional Democrat.

The 2005 study -- whose credibility the White House attacked this week -- identified 473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices, said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

Perhaps White House mouthpiece Tony Fratto meant that no e-mails were sent or received on those 473 days when he said “We have absolutely no reason to believe that any emails are missing; there's no evidence of that.

“We have no evidence and we have no way of showing that any email at all are missing.”

Well, other than the White House’s inability to produce e-mails from 473 days during the period 2003-2005, eh Tony?

I can see why reporters keep showing up for White House press briefings: There’s so much useful, reliable informaiton shared there. Why, if reporters were to miss that dog show, they’d be absolutely lost, their minds swimming with misinformation.

All I know is there’s nothing odd about the White House attacking the credibility of its own internal study, which it refuses to make public. Nothing at all. Got it?