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TechnoratiSome White House E-Mails on Fired Attorneys May be Lost
WASHINGTON - Some White House staff wrote e-mail messages about official business on Republican Party accounts, and some may have been wrongly deleted, the administration said on Wednesday in an embarrassing disclosure tied to the probe into the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.The White House said it could not rule out the possibility that some official e-mails relating to the firings had been deleted and are lost.
Democrats in Congress have been seeking copies of e-mails from the Republican National Committee as part of an investigation into whether the firing of the prosecutors last year was politically motivated.
White House spokesman Scott Stanzel told reporters 22 White House officials were allowed to maintain e-mail addresses through the Republican National Committee. They included President George W. Bush's senior political adviser, Karl Rove, and several of his deputies.
Democrats have been seeking information that might tie Rove to the decision to fire the attorneys.
Some White House aides trying to avoid violating the Hatch Act, which prohibits using government property for certain political activities, may have used the political account to communicate about official White House business, Stanzel said.
Some of those official e-mails may be lost because the RNC had a policy of deleting e-mails about every 30 days from its accounts. That policy was changed in 2004 to exclude White House officials, who are required to retain records and correspondence and everything e-mailed from a White House account is automatically archived, Stanzel said.
"Some official e-mails have potentially been lost and that is a mistake the White House is aggressively working to correct," he said.
Asked whether some of the lost e-mails could be related to the firings of the U.S. attorneys last year, Stanzel said: "That can't be ruled out."
The White House admission came as the Democratic-led Congress moved to obtain additional documents from the administration in its investigation of the firing of eight prosecutors, a case that has prompted bipartisan calls for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign.
Gonzales received a subpoena on Tuesday from the House Judiciary Committee for documents related to the firings.
The White House said Bush had asked the Justice Department to be "fully responsive" to the request.
Gonzales, who with Bush's public support has rejected calls to resign, is to appear next week before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which plans to authorize subpoenas of its own on Thursday for administration documents.
© Reuters 2007.
30 Comments so far
Show AllDad always used to say, "the bigger they are, the harder they fall." I only hope that the complete hard fall happens ASAP, because the more I read Common Dreams, the more I get anxious about whether we are ever going to get out of this with our lives and with some semblance of our freedoms.
Would someone please give W a b.j. so we can be done with him?
One would assume that the intelligence agencies work for all three branches. That if one branch makes a request for information, they would provide it? Or do they mainly work the bidding of the hawks only?
Nonetheless, all e-mails have headers which give a glue as to their transmission pathway. Internet topology is such that you can generally trace any packet/message backwards at least one hop, even as an end-user (e.g. in Thunderbird, View:Headers->All). It may be a so-called "open relay", but you'll at least be able to determine which one.
In any case, it may be a moot point. We may never see the contents of the emails, the Dems may never get the goods from the spooks, etc. But the fact that the Rethugs used private systems (secure enough?) to conduct "official" business, and fail to abide by record-keeping requirements, may be sufficient to hose them. It'll be odd that it was lack of information, rather than blatant track record in the open, that might do them in.
yes it is true. everything in washington is tapped. except the embassies perhaps. Good luck trying to get the intelligence agencies to work against a republican white house.
There is another way that email doesn't get tracked back to the original sender and that's obfuscating the sender and receiver with randomly generated numbers. You would be able to view the content of the email, but not determine who sent or received it.
Many corporations are beginning to do this because email is now being used against them in lawsuits.
I worked IT for over a decade at the state level and for a Big-10 university. There's a number of points to stress here:
* E-mail does NOT always get stored in multiple places. It can, but it doesn't have to. It depends entirely on the e-mail server configuration.
* There are ways of virtually guaranteeing that a file is completely deleted. For instance, the open source bcwipe program: http://freshmeat.net/projects/bcwipe/.
Or, at the very least, they could incinerate the hard drive every so often and buy a new one.
* I can't stress this one enough: we should be able to assume the NSA is packet-capturing the data coming/leaving the White House, at least. The Dems call up the spooks, they get the packets for the specified date range, reassemble the packets, and you're good to go.
Turning this into a big political and arm-twisting drama is beneath everyone. We're gentlemen -- no charade needed.
It is very hard to "delete" e-mail as many people have found out to their dismay. E-mail always gets stored on at least four computers, the sending computer, the receiving computer, the sending server and the receiving server, all four of which could have been permanently backed up. In addition many copies are cc'd which leads to even more opportunities for the offending e-mail to be recovered. As the previous post alluded even deleting a file on a computer rarely prevents it from being recovered later. My guess is that they will all be recovered. However we should just be impeaching the lot of them anyway.
Those emails could possibly be retrieved if the RNC backs up their servers on tape like most corporations do. Since the RNC is so large I bet they have a contractor take the tapes off-site and store them for a certain duration to be recycled later. Those tapes could contain the backup email accounts, or if they have been written over could be recovered back to a specific date even if some scumbag deleted some emails.
Unless of course they use a DOD erase scheme. Then investigators would be screwed.
What do you think they would be saying if this were Clinton? I think we maybe should get Hillary in, then we would have open government due to constant investigations! Something we truly need with this (Bush's) administration.
Of all the disgusting acts this adminstration has orchestrated it would be ironic if "email gate" takes them down...
Well, they have painted themselves into a corner this time, and I don't think Rove can squirm his way out of this one. There will be an agreement on an independent computer forensic expert. The missing e-mails will be found on the RNC hard drives; at least as far back as 2004 when e-mails were purged systematically.
This should go back far enough to cover the events and communications leading up to the firings. And if for some reason the hard drives have been tampered with or destroyed there will be hell to pay. They will have already confessed their guilt.
This could be the one strand that unwinds the whole, tightly woven ball of the Bush administration.
How ever this plays out, it is somewhat of a change to see the Democrats finally saying to the Bush administration "you're lying and we don't beleive you; cough up the emails or were going to court". Maybe if they had taken this tack 4 years ago with the cooked evidence on Iraq we wouldn't be in such a mess.
I can't imagine that anyone would fall for the spiel Dana Perino is spouting about lost emails. Just another Republican lie in a long line of many.
Don't buy the "deleted" part. Remember -- e-mail transmissions between routers on the internet are plain text. You don't have to be the NSA in order to sniff traffic, depending where on the network topology you sit. There are freely downloadable analytics programs like Wireshark.
We should assume that the NSA, etc. has all router traffic coming/leaving the White House (if not all of D.C.) packet-sniffed.
As such, it's somewhat a moot point to think this whole thing hinges on whether the RNC can cough up "deleted" e-mails. The Dems need to phone the spooks and get the captured network traffic. The messages will be there. Simple as pie if the NSA is doing their job, and the Dems do theirs.
Look at it this way....
Rove is already a NATIONAL DISGRACE, in the eyes of any informed person....
Rove's credibility zero....
Lost? Really! Destroyed, more probably (or whatever its electronic equivalent is).
ricg's comments echo my sentiments exactly.
There are no legitimate "privacy issues" here. That is the whole point of the Presidential Records Act: the records belong to the public (by way of the government) and custody must be maintained for the public. Specifically, "The United States shall reserve and retain complete ownership, possession, and control of Presidential records."
Bush and Co. have violated that law every time they did official business on Blackberries, laptops, and servers provided by the RNC. Every instance of that was a crime and they should be held accountable for each and every crime by being removed from office--which is what any business would do to an employee that did not follow protocols for maintaining custody and records of official business and ended up losing documents while using a friend's laptop and server to do company work.
Bush authorized the NAtional Security Agency to carry out domestic spying on its citizens in 2002. Could Congress ask for copies of the lost emails from?
They should let a really good electronic forensics expert into the damn RNC email system and all backups. They would find it all.
Will BushCo do it? No, they hate America.
I don't recall.
E-mails were deleted.
Mistakes were made.
It may have been that Bush's advisors worried more about the content of the e-mails getting exposed than risk facing the repercussions of disclosure failures. Wouldn't it be the ultimate irony if the NSA handed over the transmissions?
After all, e-mails are all plain-text when they hop from router to router (check the RFC's). If he's using a private site to conduct official US business, it would seem that he's exposing potentially sensitive government conversations to third parties.
This Just In:
Now the White House is claiming that they cannot produce all of the documents that Congress is asking for (now via subpoena)...
The White House now says "there may be privacy issues" that will prevent them from complying.
Privacy issues!!! Suddenly they are aware of "privacy issues".
Well "privacy issues" didn't stop these jokers from outing a CIA operative, totally destroying her career. These folks sure know how to pick and choose their "privacy issues"!
This is 100% expected.
Reminds me all too much of Ollie North and hs secretary shredding their heads off....
Unfortunately, this will continue during the next presidency as well, as folks in the US are simply too busy shopping, watching t.v. and masturbating to Internet porno sites to regain any sort of civic consciousness.
Regarding "the Hatch Act...prohibits using government property for certain political activities":
Isn't using the secondary computer systems on White House property using government property (the White House) for political activities? When they say the emails are lost, to be so in a technical sense, they would have had to destroy the hard drives on the local computers and the servers back at the RNC headquarters. If they didn't get rid of them, the emails are still retrievable with forensic software. Time to get the subpeonas rolling!
Rosemary Woods lives.
America dies a little more.
Axis of Evil: The corridor from Karl Rove's office to the Oval Office.
Everyone who has been paying any attention knows by now that it is impossible to underestimate the Bush gang's honesty, ethics, integrity, and commitment to the common good or to the constitution. The question is how long the corporate media will pretend to believe their transparent lies? How low will the corporate media allow its credibility to go?
Remember the Nixon Watergate tapes? This is more Deja Voodoo.
My understanding is that the e-mails were on Republican Party servers. Both the fact that they were not using the official government servers and the e-mails got lost suggests the firings were all about partisan politics. As a recent story indicates the thread that ties all of the fired attorneys together was their failure to push Republican generated voter fraud issues.
This would put the attorney firings and replacement by "loyal to Bush or Rove" people in the same category as Michael Brown being appointed as head of FEMA with no real qualifications.
Federal attorney is not a position suited for cronies. While these attornies are officially part of the executive branch, if what we want is quality service we need to retain people with excellent evaluations. A specific professional standard needs to be met in the same way as Supreme court justices are selected.
The bottom line question should be whether or not the White House and executive branch is more effective or less effective with Gonzales and Rove. Rove was at the center of outting Mrs. Plame and is at the center of this controversy and the fundamental question is whether or not Rove should feel free to use executive power for personal vindictiveness. In the real world, that would be considered unprofessional conduct and he would get fired. Gonzales is the primary legal enabler for Bush on the issue of torture, warrantless wiretaps, suspension of habeus corpus, secret prisons, etc... with the rationale that the war powers vote means King George can now do anything he pleases. I would like to see Gonzales not only removed but disbarred for giving legal rationale to Bush's relentless attack on the constitution.
"One day it all come crashing down."
One day it will all come crashing down.
Pardon the gram
"Embarrassing"? Here comes the coverup. Ironic if after all the horrendous crimes it ends up being Attorneygate that brings down this administration.
This is a surprise to who? What would indicate to anyone that a bunch of corporate crooks who stole an election would have an honest bone in their body, or be compassionate, or patriotic? These folks are standing on a foundation of lies and deception, and the only way to keep above the tide of truth is to stack up more lies and deception. One day it all come crashing down. What we need to be concerned with is how many good folks will be crushed beneath the years of foul policy. It doesn't look to good for all us true "little" Americans!
I'm quite sure that it was an accident...sort of like Bush's "lost" military record. We know these mistakes happen, just look at the 18.5 minutes erased from Nixon's tapes!
It didn't work for him, but I'm afraid it will for the Bush gang.