Shades of Nixon--TPM reports an 18-day gap of emails in the latest document dump

Now this is interesting. Talking Points Memo is reporting that there is an 18-day gap in the emails provided by the latest 3000-plus document release from the Justice Department. The gap takes place between November 15th and December 4th of last year. This is what Talking Points Memo reports on this gap:

I think a commenter in our document dump research thread may have been the first to notice that the emails released by the Justice Department seem to have a gap between November 15th and December 4th of last year.

(Our commenter saw it late on the evening of the dump itself -- see the comment date-stamped March 20, 2007 02:19 AM in the research thread)

The firing calls went out on December 7th. But the original plan was to start placing the calls on November 15th. So those eighteen days are pretty key ones.

Mike Allen spotted it this evening in the Politico.

An eighteen-day email gap between the date of the original planned firings, and when the firings took place. I wonder--is there a conspiracy within the Bush White House to use the number Eighteen as a means to cover their own involvement in the attorney purge, just as the Nixon administration may have used the number Eighteen to create that famous gap in the Watergate tapes? There should be a congressional investigation into this latest conspiracy--in fact, I would demand that Congress subpoena the number Eighteen to explain both the email gap on the attorney purge, and the erasure of that famous Watergate tape. Of course, President Bush will claim executive privilege for allowing the number Eighteen to provide honest advise to the Bush White House. Which means we have another constitutional crisis here!

TPM Muckraker has got White House Press Secretary Tony Snow's response to the email gap.