How stupid can Rove and Cheney possibly be?
This one really takes the cake. And, it keeps
getting worse and worse.

The Mother Jones Blog:


RE: Those Missing White House Emails
Subpoenas have been authorized, the press is swarming, the Bush
administration's flacks are taking a pounding - I think it's safe to say
that the White House email controversy has officially blossomed into a
full-blown scandal. This week the White House acknowledged that it may have
"lost" an unspecified number of emails that were sent by staffers who used
non-governmental, RNC-issued email addresses in what seemed at times a
conscious effort to prevent their correspondence from becoming public
record. "We screwed up, and we're trying to fix it," White House
spokesperson Dana Perino told the press yesterday. She noted that only "a
small slice" of the president's staff - among them Karl Rove and his
deputies - used email addresses, along with BlackBerrys and laptops,
supplied by the RNC. However, no mention has been made - and it's possible
that in the end there may be no way of knowing - of just how many
administration officials were circumventing the White House servers by using
conventional Web mail services, such as Yahoo! or Gmail. This also appears
to have been a fairly common practice among staffers who, as one
administration official told U.S. News & World Report in 2004, "don't want
my email made public."

As the White House comes under increasing scrutiny, the picture just keeps
getting bleaker. We learned yesterday, for instance, that until August 2004
the RNC had a policy of deleting emails on its servers that were more than
30 days old. After "legal inquires," presumably those of CIA leak prosecutor
Patrick Fitzgerald, the committee began saving the correspondence of White
House officials. So, since Karl Rove is said to use his RNC address 95
percent of the time, and is a well known email fanatic, the RNC should have
quite a hefty record of his communications, right? Strangely, the RNC
doesn't have records of a single Rove email until 2005, which, as the
committee's counsel Rob Kelner told members of Henry Waxman's Government
Reform Committee, may have been because Rove was deleting them himself.
This, it seems, is what led the RNC to remove Rove's ability to delete his
messages and place an automatic archiving function solely on his account.
Today, Rove's lawyer Robert Luskin explained that his client didn't
intentionally purge his emails - rather, in the course of routine
housekeeping, he would delete emails to keep his inbox in order. "His
understanding starting very, very early in the administration was that those
e-mails were being archived," Luskin said.

Beyond Rove's missing emails, and others the White House believes may have
been lost due to the RNC's email purging policy, it seems there is another
trove of emails that are unaccounted for - millions of them, actually. The
watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reported
yesterday that, according to two sources, "in addition to the so-called
political emails sent through private accounts, there are over five million
emails sent on White House servers over a two-year period that are also
missing." In 2005, according to CREW, the White House Office of
Administration discovered a problem with its archiving system and, after
looking further into the issue, realized "there were hundreds of days in
which emails were missing for one or more of the EOP [Executive Office of
the President] components subject to the PRA [Presidential Records Act]."
Though a plan was drawn up to recover the missing emails, CREW says, no
action was ever taken to retrieve the lost messages.

In its report, CREW also raises two issues that I brought up in my original
story on the controversy. The first is the Hatch Act "excuse," as CREW puts
it. The White House has maintained (and the press hasn't challenged) that
administration officials with political duties were using a separate,
RNC-administered email system in order to avoid breaching Hatch, which
prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activity on the job.
This certainly seems like a reasonable explanation, unless you actually read
the law. It states clearly that Senate-confirmed presidential appointees and
staffers whose salaries are paid from an appropriation for the Executive
Office of the President (read: White House officials) are allowed to engage
in political activity that is otherwise prohibited to other federal
employees - for instance, they are allowed to talk strategy with the RNC
anytime, anywhere - as long as the associated costs are not picked up by
taxpayers. While in the Clinton White House separate computer terminals were
apparently set aside for staffers with political duties, the use of partisan
email addresses is a new and highly unusual wrinkle. As Steven Aftergood,
the director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government
Secrecy told me a couple weeks back, "It shows how closely intertwined the
White House is with its partisan allies. The fact that the White House and
the RNC are working hand in hand and White House officials are using RNC
emails is itself remarkable."

The other question I raised has to do with an intriguing line in a January
2006 letter from Patrick Fitzgerald to Scooter Libby's defense team that's
buried deep in the USA V. Libby docket. In it, Fitzgerald informs Libby's
lawyers that the prosecution had "learned that not all email of the Office
of Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time
periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the
White House computer system." Karl Rove's lawyer told the AP today that
Fitzgerald had access to emails from Rove's various accounts. He also noted
that, in addition to the White House, the prosecutor subpoenaed records from
the RNC and the president's reelection campaign. "There's never been any
suggestion that Fitzgerald had anything less than a complete record," Luskin
said.

Considering that we now know that millions of White House emails are
potentially MIA, all of them drafted during a time period that would have
been relevant to Fitzgerald's investigation, if that hasn't been suggested
before it certainly will be now.

Posted by Daniel Schulman on 04/13/07 at 11:23 AM