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I remember reading about how the federal agencies involved in the Waco massacre claimed both in court and to numerous FOIA requests that they had little to no video or audio recordings of the raid or the siege, and maintained this story for years. Finally it was revealed through litigation that pretty much all the agents involved in documenting the operations had claimed to be using "personal" devices for their official documentation, with the understanding that anything useful to the agencies would be entered into the record when it was convinient to do so, and the rest withheld from public scrutiny indefinitely. This was in 1993, more than three decades ago.
Within the last few weeks, we've seen ATF agents involved in an unjustifiable no-knock raid resulting in the fatal shooting of a law-abiding citizen claim to have left their body-cameras behind. In the shooting of Bundy supporter Roy Finecum (Wikipedia, lol), FBI agents attempted to conceal having fired shots at Finecum while his empty hands were raised over his head. The record overflows with similar examples.
We discuss with some frequency the question of whether government conspiracies are possible. What we see here, as we have seen many, many times before, is that deliberate efforts to evade lawful oversight are both routine and universal. Nor is there any reason to believe that all or even most such efforts are caught; given the absurd scenarios that result in discovery, here being one email mistakenly breaking cover, or in Hillary's case an unrelated sex-crimes investigation snagging a laptop with emails on it, we are very clearly only seeing a small and randomly-selected portion of the cases. This was, in fact, a government conspiracy, directly related to one of the worst disasters of the last hundred years, which very well might have been directly caused by the conspirators themselves.
No one cares. Nothing will be done. Everyone knows it.
[EDIT] - Why not demand the emails from Google? The government spies on my emails just fine, why can't they get those of Fauci and friends?
There were also a number of 'official' recordings that just disappeared, too, along with other disappearing physical evidence like the famous front door. With the noteworthy exception of Kahoe after Ruby Ridge, it's less that bringing any enforcement against FBI or DoJ destruction of evidence was tried and found hard, and more than trying them was found undesirable and left untried.
In theory, that's the next step: the House had already asked Morens twice about his personal e-mails, producing 2k with a 'voluntary' letter in November 2023, and then getting this dump of 30k pages after a subpoena mid-April 2024, and they had credible reason to believe he was sandbagging them.
But the House investigations are not criminal investigations, nor are they the FBI or DoJ. The theoretically-broad subpoena powers are limited on the enforcement side, and there's little if any executive branch support here. With a few notable exceptions all on one side of the political aisle, the threat of a contempt of congress charge is toothless unless the issuing subpoena bends over backwards about following all rules, and unlikely even then.
And one of those rules are 18 USC 2702, which generally prohibits ISPs from disclosing stored data. There are a few exceptions -- LEO have wide cutouts in 18 USC 2517, 18 USC 2511(2)(a)ii lets FISA and the attorney general do whatever they want -- and some that apply outside of a warrant, but nothing relevant here. This is also why, even though using a personal e-mail for government business makes the entire personal e-mail subject to FOIA review in civil courts (though see caveat about "under agency control", since Fauci retired), it's almost always necessary to motion for a party to the case to disclose them, rather than the ISP or e-mail service.
So, uh, mostly because they don't want to be able to.
If the House really had stones, they would threaten to zero out the budgets of offices evading their investigations. And follow through as necessary.
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