There have been some attempts to pass off this White House/RNC rush to destroy the evidence with a shrug and a "How unfortunate, but these emails are systematically deleted as a matter of common practice."

But that’s not true, because if it were, it would be true for ALL of the RNC email accounts. But the distribution of reported deletions is clearly biased to those accounts that would be more likely to be investigated.

I simply can not believe that there aren’t multiple backups of ALL of this stuff. It is such a basic IT practice.

Every large organization, and the Republican National Committee (RNC) is certainly one of these, backs up its email. This is a common practice for the simple reason that servers fail. The hardware can fail for lots of reasons, email databases can be "corrupted" (index information is destroyed so although the email is there, your map to where it is stored is lost), and viruses can infect the email database.

So organizations back up email databases, usually daily. The most recent backup is kept on another server. If the email system crashes, you copy over yesterday’s backup to a clean machine and restart.

You don’t discard these backups for a long time. Years. After a few days, backup files are moved to more permanent media, like digital tape or CDs or DVDs, and put in a safe place. Companies that do not do this for themselves hire IT firms to manage it for them.

I have no problem believing that most of the RNC office staff may think that if they print an email and run it through a shredder, then it’s gone. But anyone with ANY exposure to this stuff knows that old files never die, they just get archived, both in the sender’s environment and in the recipient’s. If the NSA weren’t currently serving as Bush & Co’s personal Band of Dementors, they could probably gather this stuff up in about 20 minutes.

The RNC email servers and all of these file backups represent the highest grade of information available for the decisions that comprise the Attorney General’s scandal, the Abu Ghraib human rights violations, and who knows what other criminal acts spewing from this administration. These materials need to be seized and handed over to an unbiased/unbought group for forensic investigation.

It’s a crime that they tried to destroy this evidence. But I don’t believe that this content is really gone, because it is really hard to kill it all. And I want to know what’s in those emails. That’s where the impeachment gold is.