DOE sends a "litigation hold notice" regarding CRU to employees – asking to "preserve documents"

It’s worse than we thought.

Perhaps it’s to do with this one…
http://eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=946&filename=1230052094.txt
From: Ben Santer
To: lbutler@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Subject: Re: averaging
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2008 12:08:14 -0800
Reply-to: santer1@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Cc: Tom Wigley , kevin trenberth
Dear Lisa,
That’s great news! I’ve confirmed with DOE that I can use up to $10,000
of my DOE Fellowship to provide financial support for Tom’s Symposium. I
will check with Anjuli Bamzai at DOE to determine whether there are any
strings attached to this money. I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to use
the DOE money for the Symposium dinner, and to defray some of the travel
expenses of international participants who can’t come up with their own
travel money. I’ll try to resolve this question in the next few days.
Best wishes to you and your family for a very Merry Christmas, and a
happy, healthy, and peaceful 2009!

I haven’t read through ALL of the responses, but there’s a point here I’d like to make. This “notice”, in effect, is not so much an order to preserve documents, as a WARNING to DESTROY them. For the really incriminating stuff, there’s nothing to lose by destroying it, even if you get caught destroying it. Our lawyer friend mentioned certain “sanctions”, which basically revolved around the the prosecution being able to assume that the destroyed documents were “bad” for the defendant. But this is certainly couldn’t be any worse than what the documents ACTUALLY showed. And it only helps the prosecution if the destroyers are caught. And if an individual gets caught destroying stuff, he’ll just claim it was accidental – that he didn’t know that file had anything to do with global warming; or he just likes to clean out his old email messages once a month; or he missed that memo from the Legal Counsel. Of course, computer experts know that, unless you’re really, really computer savvy, no electronic document is EVER completely destroyed – there’s a backup somewhere. But I wonder how diligent DOE’s IT techs will be in ferreting out document destruction and finding the backups. I wonder how far Obama’s Secretary of Energy will go to help bring down his own side of this debate.
Believe me, the paper shredders at DOE will be working overtime tonight. And probably a few well-placed IT techs with AGW sympathies will be deleting the electronic trails. In the end, even if they get caught, DOE will claim, just like CRU, that the evidence was just “lost”. If the DOE really wanted these documents preserved, they would have sent teams of investigators to all facilities, simultaneously, and just kicked everyone out of their offices and began searching. The real content of this message was “delete or destroy everything you have that could be used to disprove global warming or prove fraud or malfeasance on the part of anyone who is a global warming alarmist. Immediately.”

“Alan (02:20:59) :
Excuse me – but what jurisdiction do Americans have over the UK – If any action is necessary (and I believe that it is) it needs to be a British court
This is obviuosly an amusing parody
Proud to be a cultured civilised European”
It may very well be a civil action which can be pursued anywhere relevant. The DoEn may want it’s money back – breach of contract. I’m guessing it’s a spoof but then again that was our initial thought about the emails from UEA.
cheers David

They DOE is collecting all the incriminating data so they can get rid of all the evidence.

If CO2 levels trend the same way as the temperature levels of 800 years ago, doesn’t this mean that CO2 levels will continue to rise for another 200 years (though less and less) to match the Medieval Warm Period and then will drop again for 600 years?
If I could get the data for CO2 levels and temperature for the past 650,000 years as claimed, I could do some analysis on how good of a predictor past temperature is on CO2 levels as well as the margin of error.

evanmjones (21:39:57) :
This is going to cost them. Not only an incredibly difficult (and painful) search, but also what’s going to happen to them when the alums finally catch on and the spigot goes dry.
If I were UAE, I’d save a lot of money by simply setting fire to the building and blaming AGW.
I’m guessing that ‘alums’ is shorthand for alumni, and assuming that you’re over on the left-hand side of the pond. My understanding is that universities in the US receive much funding (regular, sometimes large amounts) from their alumni.
Not the case in UK. Here, most of it is from the state (= government). Contributions from individuals are rare, usually a sizeable one-off from a wealthy individual and for a specific purpose. If the reputation of a university is tainted, there is little, if anything , that the unfortunate alumni can do about it.

There are a number of emails that refer to DOE funding of CRU. A search on “Dept. of Energy “, “DOE”, or other agencies and laboratories will return many results. Here’s a couple:
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=3&filename=835819980.txt
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=950&filename=1231257056.txt
Many more that also mention various National Labs, etc. , in a variety of contexts.
I would expect that all of these labs, agencies, etc. will shortly be issuing similar missives. This will end up being the mother of all document searches, and will take years to sort it out.

I haven’t read through all the comments so someone else may have already pointed this out. The effect of a “litigation hold” on otherwise public documents is to temporarily take them out of the public domain on the theory that they are litigation sensitive and subject to a government privilege against disclosure. So, I don’t think this really means anything more than the documents are now, for the time being, off limits to the public.

The DOE isn’t “getting rid of incriminating evidence.” You don’t understand how bureacracy or the legal system works. Everyone has their own specific jobs to do and they do them diligently without regard for how they affect any other part. (this is why bureacracy and the legal system are so frustrating to all)
What this notice signals is that now the legal machinery has been started. It is a monstrous mechanism, difficult to get moving, but once these wheels begin to turn they grind on for years and cannot be stopped. There is no one person anywhere who has the power to stop them once they have been started, and yet there are thousands whose full time job is to keep these wheels well oiled and moving. (Preserving and sorting this paperwork is going to be guaranteed, well paid employment for 1,000 government lawyers for many years)
There was a point made early on in this thread which is the most important, I think, of all, since it is what will be on the mind of everyone who is involved in this in any way from now on:
“3) Since we now all have lawyers, we can only safely talk with our lawyers present. So effectively communication, and all work are shut down.”
It has to be shut down – imagine if you are at work and you know that *every* e-mail you write, every communication of any kind that you have is going to be scrutinized by some legal overseer and you have been told “Anything you say can and will be used against you!!!” Think about working in such an environment. And this is going to go on for years, because cases this big always do.
This is how just the threat of litigation neutralizes any organization.

tokyoboy – Your travesty question.
It is a travesty when people dressed in furs and diamonds walk past a starving human being.
It is a travesty when teachers in public schools teach American children to despise their own country’s history, promoting socialist values and ignoring everything our forefathers fought for.
It is a travesty when American politicians get angry at the email “hackers or thieves” who brought this CRU work to light.
Travesty – a strong word denoting the gravest disappointment.