Watching the program, you'd think she went from saying she wouldn't rule out the potential of 5 million messages lost and then admitted they'd screwed up by losing the messages.

But the fact is, Ms. Perino talked about the 5 million messages on Monday, April 16th, but the statement about screwing up actually came from the April 12th Press Briefing from the previous Thursday. And, she wasn't talking about screwing up losing 5 million messages. She'd just finished talking about the policy of archiving RNC political email, a related but different technical problem.

Our analysis throughout this process has shown that email management within the Executive Office of the President is fundamentally flawed, and has been across administrations. There's no doubt this isn't good and needs to be fixed. But the process of understanding is made vastly harder when everyone, left and right, Republican and Democrat, mainstream media and blogger, are all distorting the facts for their own agenda.

It's starting to piss me off.

Looking at how hard it is to find the grains of truth from an event barely a month old, it's fascinating to me that historians are able to claim that they can reconstruct historical events from hundreds or even thousands of years ago. An archeologist finds a clay pot in the desert and all of a sudden, we have a complete history of an ancient civilization. I don't think so.

In fact, I'm beginning to think that every discussion of history should begin with a disclaimer: Uh, well, see, we have no real idea what happened here, but we're makin' some wild-ass guesses. Based on these guesses, we've come up with a heck of a story. Now, let me tell you about the Battle of Thermopylae....

Deconstructing a possible loss of email messages
In response to the allegations of missing emails, Senate Judiciary Commitee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) made the following statement:

You can't erase emails, not today. They've gone through too many servers. They can't say they've been lost. That's like saying, "The dog ate my homework."

Unfortunately, Senator Leahy's statement is flawed. Never underestimate the ability of technology to fail in interesting and spectacular ways. The senator is really making three technical statements:

• Email messages can't be erased
• Email messages traversing servers are stored during as they go through the server
• Email messages can't be lost

"You can't erase emails, not today."
This is the subject of the whole double-delete question introduced in an earlier article. Let's look at the two ways email messages can be stored for use by Outlook users. If an email message is stored in a PST file, the email message, when first deleted, drops into the Deleted Items folder. This, of course, can be undeleted.