As much as the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America states "We the people," in the context of this set of articles, it's almost more appropriate to say, "You the experts".

We have the utmost respect for developers both at IBM Lotus and at Microsoft and, between our OutlookPower and DominoPower magazines, we probably reach more active Notes/Domino and Outlook/Exchange experts than any other organization. It's likely that some of you will be the people or work for the companies that the Executive Office of the President will turn to in order to resolve this technical controversy.

To be honest, it'd be vastly easier for us to keep running the easy, little tips and techniques we like to run as our general editorial material. But the fact is, this series of articles is totally on mission.

This isn't about whether you like George W. Bush or not, or whether you liked Bill Clinton or not. It's about email usage, management and oversight in the Executive Office of the President -- not just George W. Bush's EOP, but email usage for any administration.

And with that, we continue our tour throught the digital detritus of the White House email system. But first, let's get an update with the news this week.

"There's a whole lot of judgement, shoot-from-the-hip reporting, and vitriolic opinion bubbling up from the bowels of blogs."

Congress issues subpoena for emails
This week, Senate Judiciary Commitee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) issued a subpoena to United States Attorney General Alberto Gonzales demanding he "Provide E-Mails To Judiciary Committee In Connection With Panel's Probe Of U.S. Attorney Firings And Politicization Within Dept. Of Justice".

Obviously, this issue is very partisan. According to an AP report reprinted by Fox News, Leahy stated, on the floor of Congress:

They say they have not been preserved. I don't believe that!...You can't erase emails, not today. They've gone through too many servers. Those emails are there; they just don't want to produce them. We'll subpoena them if necessary.

And, so, on Wednesday, they did. As part of our ongoing technical investigation, we'll try to answer the core question here: could the emails have been deleted?

The road, thus far
We've got quite a ways to go before we're able to answer that question. Right now, we're still looking into the DNS records for GWB43.COM. Last week, we answered the question "Who runs GWB43.COM?" with the identification of SMARTech Corporation as the company that provided domain name services, email services, and Web services for many Republican candidates, campaigns, and government officials.

Even though there was a very curious question of why some podunk ISP in the middle of Tennessee was used as the primary gateway for Republican digital politics and a very weird link between the Republican Ohio gubernatorial candidate who also oversaw the Ohio elections and SMARTech, we found no evidence of wrongdoing with SMARTech.