Key observations from Ms. Ralston's testimony
Let's get to the most interesting observation first. On Page 19, Line 10 of her testimony was this innocuous-seeming paragraph:

It may have been four or flve times. I can't say specifically, but it seemed to be a number of times. Karl would get a new computer. He would lose a BlackBerry. Whenever this happened, there would be some conversation with the IS&T people about his mail file.

That's it. That's the only mention of the subject. Just, as a matter of course, "He would lose a BlackBerry." Why the investigators asked no further questions on this topic is just a mystery.

We all know what a BlackBerry can hold. It can hold a lot of email correspondence. It can hold phone numbers, contact information, calendar information, and even documents. And Mr. Rove, the Deputy White House Chief of Staff, would lose his BlackBerry.

Question: How many BlackBerry devices did Mr. Rove lose?

Question: What sort of information was on each BlackBerry when it was lost?

Question: What efforts were taken to recover these missing devices and their potentially classified information?

We also got some other useful insights from Ms. Ralston's testimony. For example, we now know that Mr. Rove had three email accounts, a political email account, a White House email account, and a personal email account, running over AOL, of all things.

Other details from the testimony that relate to our discussion include:

• During the Plame leak investigation, Patrick Fitzgerald and his team took Mr Rove's political laptop and his BlackBerry. This would mean that some of his records are likely in the hands of the Special Prosecutor.

• Apparently, during the leak investigation, Mr. Rove and Ms. Ralston "would go and do keyword searches, based on the subpoena that we got, and search all of his folders for keywords." While we agree that government oversight is a good thing, this activity seems like a very bad use of time. First, the investigators were asking the investigatees to find incriminating evidence, and, second, the time of a very key government official was spent sifting through keyword searches.

• Rove printed many of his email messages. Specifically, "Well, if there was follow-up action or it was something lengthy that he would 1ike to read later, he would print it out. He would often get a lot of articles to read, so they would be things to print out and then look at later."

• These printouts were managed by a government entity called "Records Management", which was responsible for all the files storage in Mr. Rove's office.

• Mr. Rove only had one BlackBerry (at a time, apparently). He did, however, have two phones.

We also discovered that Mr. Rove has a domain name, ROVE.COM. A quick Whois shows us that ROVE.COM is managed by PrismNet.com, a Texas ISP, as shown in Figure A.