Whistleblower ordered to 'find and pursue crimes' got a deleted email as backup, then hours with federal investigators.

…(cont) That's a serious claim about a state law enforcement office, and serious claims are supposed to evaporate under scrutiny. This one did the opposite. On Tuesday, an email surfaced — a deleted email, recovered from wherever deleted things go when someone remembers to ask nicely — and it did not contradict the prosecutor. It matched. All together now: "find and pursue crimes." Four words, previously believed erased, now Exhibit A.

I am not going to speculate about who hit delete or why, because I don't have that filing and I don't invent filings. What I have is the sequence, and the sequence is the whole story: a person says they were told to manufacture a case against a political opponent of the state; the office's own paper trail says the same thing in the same words; and federal investigators, presented with both, did the responsible thing and sat the whistleblower down for several hours on Tuesday to go through it.

Several hours is not a coffee break. Several hours is the amount of time it takes to walk a person through a directive, an org chart, and an email that outlived its own deletion. The Attorney General's office runs on the public's trust and the public's payroll — the prosecutor's original complaint, in fact, was about taxpayer money spent chasing one man instead of one law. If the email holds up the way it's holding up so far, the office will have spent that money proving the prosecutor right.

Nobody broke into anything to get this story. Nobody needed to. The office wrote it down, then tried to unwrite it, and the unwriting didn't take. That's not a caper. That's a filing cabinet with a long memory.