Take that hand out of the cookie jar.
What do you do when you know the subpoenas are on the way over? If you're a GOP congressional loser, keep it secret until all that pesky evidence is long gone:
The late disclosure of Weldon’s subpoena, as well as the separate subpoenas to the committees and staffers, which all came after Congress formally adjourned, also raise questions about whether anyone in the House did anything to protect the documents, electronic or otherwise. According to two outside sources, the Chief Administrative Officer’s office routinely erases the contents of members and staffers’ computers once they leave the House.
Once subpoenas are issued, however, leaders in the House and Senate, as well as the general counsel, are legally required to make an effort to preserve documents and ensure they are not being inadvertently or purposefully deleted or destroyed. Because of the Democratic takeover, Republicans lost numerous committee staffers, making efforts to maintain documents even more important.
But remeber, it's a trick they learned from the White House:
As White House counsel, he [Gonzales] was the one first notified that the Justice Department, at the request of the C.I.A., had opened an investigation into the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife. That notification came at 8:30 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2003, but it took Mr. Gonzales 12 more hours to inform the White House staff that it must "preserve all materials" relevant to the investigation. This 12-hour delay, he has said, was sanctioned by the Justice Department, but since the department was then run by John Ashcroft, a Bush loyalist who refused to recuse himself from the Plame case, inquiring Senate Democrats would examine this 12-hour delay as closely as an 18½-minute tape gap. "Every good prosecutor knows that any delay could give a culprit time to destroy the evidence," said Senator Charles Schumer, correctly, back when the missing 12 hours was first revealed almost two years ago.
I think we're going to see quite a bit of this in the years to come. Clumsy attempts to destroy the evidence by former GOP operatives caught in the crosshairs, followed by its inevitable discovery. You would think that a bunch who cut their teeth in the Nixon administration would have learned that it's not the crime, it's the coverup.
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