Oliver North may go down in history as the first government official snared because of incriminating information exchanged through e-mail.
Back in 1985, North was a Reagan administration official and a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal, which involved secretly selling weapons to Iran to fund Nicaraguan rebels. The actions were illegal and North was convicted of three felony counts--which were eventually overturned on the theory that Congress had granted him limited immunity in exchange for his testimony.
What makes North a candidate for this gallery of rogues is that when the scandal broke in November 1986, he and John Poindexter began deleting more than 5,000 e-mail messages from White House computers. What they didn't seem to know is that backup tapes were kept, and investigators were able to reconstruct the correspondence. (Click here for some representative excerpts.)
Today, North is a political commentator and host of the Fox News program "War Stories."
Photo by North's mugshot after his arrest
