Sunday, March 15, 2009

Let's start the guessing game

Clancy DuBos gets all legalese and speculates on why Veronica White's computer was confiscated and what the Fed may be up to. I'm not sure about his hypothesis....because I'm not smart enough to understand how conspiracy charges are formed, but I totally agree with his notion that the computer seizures were probably executed to shore up an ongoing investigation (s).

Also...I brought this up once, but I want to bring it up again. In a document released in May of 2008 acting CTO, Anthony Jones, published this memorandum:

Email Guidelines and Policies for
The City of New Orleans


Please take note of this item:

3.6 Recovering Deleted Email via Backup Media or re-managing for data recovery or Forensic reasons.
City of New Orleans maintains backup tapes from the email server and once a quarter a set of tapes is
taken out of the rotation and they are moved offsite. No effort will be made to remove email from the offsite backup tapes. If data is needed for business continuity or Forensics the City State or Local government must designate a representative to re-manage the suspect account maintaining a strict chain-of-custody on said documents until the needs of the city our met.

My question is obvious...why hasn't Judge Ledet asked MIS to produce the tape backups? Let's go out on a limb and say all the emails were somehow lost on the city's email server(s). This item clearly states they were already using an OFFSITE tape backup system which was cycled every three months. The way this works is that the email servers are conducting scheduled backups onto tape drives at given intervals....could be once a day or once a week or once a month, pending the volume of emails generated. So even if the server(s) crashed....and it's damn near impossible for every drive in a server to crash unless someone came in and poured acid over the entire server or put an electromagnet on it....the only emails that would have been lost are the ones that weren't yet cycled to the tape backups. At the theoretical maximum it would have only been 3 months worth of emails.

So IF they were following proper procedure as this memo published on May 13 of 2008 (which I find a curious time to bring this to the MIS department's attention) defines....then there have to be tape backups of the email database.

Is Nagin suggesting that emails were lost on both the email servers and the tape backups....tapes which were stored at an entirely different location than the servers? His original claim that the emails were lost on the servers was hard to choke down....but if he's going to claim that the tape backups were lost as well when they were being stored offsite....dude...he's giving Joe Isuzu a run for his money.

Judge Ledet....Subpoena the tapes!

I'm beginning to wonder if she isn't giving him all the rope he needs to hang himself. I'm betting he's already committed perjury.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Folks, let's cut to the chase here: the timeline is very important. The White/Washington request email goes through just a couple hours after the WWL request. What do you want to bet Nagin's emails got deleted THEN. The question then is who ordered the Nagin deletion and who was in the room; and then the same questions for the delivery of the council emails. Add up Dubos' timeline and the handy public records regs and facts provided in this blog and what you have is a conspiracy to violate public records laws (not only regarding prodcing but refarding RETAINING them and protecting them), civil rights violations, spoliation of evidence, extortion, and obstruction of justice. And then, all in the defense of what? Contracts discussions? Embarrassing personal details? Merely to leverage political advantage? All of the above?

Here's also the next level of inquiry: Is Nagin's next step to get on Sen. Landrieu and even the DOJ to intervene, as a kind of ace in the hole? Well??? On the other hand maybe Letten has a ton of confidence in his situation to take this to the ultimate step. Or perhaps, as he has shown before, he will simply do the right thing because it is the right thing to do.

mominem said...

what does "re-manage" mean?

Anonymous said...

Dambala,
I agree with your final point about Judge Ledet: she was giving them enough rope to hang themselves. And I think the feds are showing up just in time to play hangman.

Anonymous said...

"Here's also the next level of inquiry: Is Nagin's next step to get on Sen. Landrieu and even the DOJ to intervene, as a kind of ace in the hole? Well??"

I'm not getting exactly why you'd think Nagin would think he could rely on Sen. Landrieu or the Justice Dept. to bail him out. I'd say there's likely no love lost between Nagin and Sen. Landrieu, particularly since the last mayor's election...

Anonymous said...

Just possibly "hangman" isn't the term we should throw around, seeing as how Ray's going to use everything he can do turn this into a racial attack.

Anonymous said...

Uhm, Puddinhead, you were sayin' why would Letten be on the firing line? Well, gee, this has happened rather suddenly and coincidentally would't ya say? Why, indeed.

http://www.wwltv.com/topstories/stories/wwl031609cbletten.4161a10f.html

Anonymous said...

Sudden? If you consider something first covered in the TP in November of last year "sudden", then yeah, I guess so...

"If tradition holds sway, U.S. Attorney Jim Letten will start packing up his office sometime early next year..."
http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/11/landrieu_declares_support_for.html

Interestingly, when local Republican big-wigs were compiling their list of U.S. Attorney candidates to present to the incoming Bush Administration, Letten's name was nowhere to be found, even though he was a career attorney already in the office. The position was treated as a "spoils" slot to park a Party "money man", and the nominee was landfill owner and generous Republican donor Fred Heebe, whose candidacy exploded over personal issues. Letten got the job by just sort of already being there, and then eventually found himself a favorite of Sen. Diaper Dave.

Anonymous said...

Puddinhead, I quite agree with all your comments. I just think it's interesting that as of the prior article Landrieu was giving her full support, and now according to WWL TV it's "But she admits she is willing to consider a change. "I have been open to receiving recommendations broadly from the community about the U.S. attorneys of all three districts, the marshals in all three districts, judges, and the vacancies that are open now. And as I have said I am taking all of this under advisement," she said." - Now maybe this is more of an issue of why did WWL TV just decide to drop this story at this particular point in time. On the other hand, maybe she is receiving some pretty heated calls from some pretty connected people these last few days.

Anonymous said...

I guess I wasn't saying Nagin might not be throwing lifelines out like cheap beads as much as I was saying I don't see Sen. Landrieu as being one very likely to grab on and haul him in. Besides her being among the least doctrinaire and partisan Democrats in the Senate (ask just about any "progressive" blogger--they hate her), there's the matter of her little brother being either the "Man" out to disenfranchise the African-American voters and/or the liberal out to fleece the Uptown crowd, depending on who Nagin was talking to at the time.