Paging Ms. Woods

Rose Mary Woods was the loyal secretary to Richard Nixon who "accidentally" erased 18 1/2 minutes of potentially incriminating audio evidence from the Watergate tapes.

While she was performing her duties, she said, the phone rang. As she reached for it, she said she inadvertently struck the erase key on the tape recorder and kept her foot on the machine's pedal, forwarding the tape.

A photograph taken of Miss Woods re-creating the event, nearly sprawling to do both simultaneously, made her gesture look like a gymnastic feat. Some wags, according to a Washington Post article at the time, dubbed it "the Rose Mary Stretch."

Well, it appears the prosecutor in Plamegate appears to have found the "Rose Mary Stretch II," or "the Rove Mary Stretch":

Fitzgerald, who is fighting Libby's request, said in a letter to Libby's lawyers that many e-mails from Cheney's office at the time of the Plame leak in 2003 have been deleted contrary to White House policy.

We already knew that then-White House counsel Abu Gonzales tipped off the troops in the Oval Office that something was coming down the pike:

As White House counsel, [Alberto Gonzales] was the one first notified that the Justice Department, at the request of the C.I.A., had opened an investigation into the outing of Joseph Wilson’s wife. That notification came at 8:30 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2003, but it took Mr. Gonzales 12 more hours to inform the White House staff that it must “preserve all materials” relevant to the investigation.

It's been a time-honored tradition in modern Washington, from Rose Mary Woods to Fawn Hall, to destroy the evidence. But in the Internet age, there's data recovery, which makes it at least possible to find these missing emails. The point is that this is classic obstruction of justice. That was one of the indictments brought down on Scooter Libby. Unca Karl Rove, Unca Dick Cheney, better look over your shoulders, dudes.