When it looks like these missing emails may have altered other investigations then it is time for a criminal probe into it:

Apparent gaps in White House e-mail archives coincide with dates in late 2003 and early 2004 when the administration was struggling to deal with the CIA leak investigation and the possibility of a congressional probe into Iraq intelligence failures.

Here is where the Plame case may come into play in this:

Among the times for which e-mail may not have been archived from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office are four days in early October 2003, just as a federal probe was beginning into the leak of Valerie Plame’s CIA identity, an inquiry that eventually ensnared Cheney’s chief of staff.

Pretty convenient that emails would happen to be missing from those four days, and Melanie Sloan seems to concur:

“Can it be a mere coincidence that some of the missing e-mail correspond to a key period during the Valerie Plame investigation?” asked Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “Given everything else we know, that is nearly impossible to believe.”

Perhaps it’s time for Fitzgerald to re-open this case and pursue other criminal charges into the cover-up.