Missing White House e-Mails May Have Violated Law, Panel Says
WASHINGTON - Presidential adviser Karl Rove sent more than 140,000 e-mails through the Republican National Committee’s computer system, circumventing a federal law intended to guarantee the preservation of presidential records, House of Representatives investigators have concluded.
While 88 White House aides used the back-channel system, Rove was its biggest user at the White House, and more than half of his communications dealt with official business, according to an interim report by the House Oversight Committee.
The White House initially had said that about 50 presidential aides used the Republican Party e-mail system to avoid sending political messages improperly through the White House system, which is supposed to be reserved for official government business.
But the line between official communications and partisan political messages seems to have been blurred. Susan Ralston, a former aide to Rove, told congressional investigators that Rove sent almost all of his e-mails through the RNC system and used a Blackberry that he received from the Republican Party from his first day at the White House.
Although 140,216 of Rove’s e-mails have been preserved, committee investigators found that e-mails from 51 of the 88 White House aides who used the back-channel message system appear to have been destroyed.
Investigators said they could find no record of e-mails from Ken Mehlman, a former Rove aide who later became Republican Party chairman. Ralston told investigators that Mehlman regularly used the RNC e-mail system when he worked at the White House.
“At this point in the investigation, it is not possible to determine how many presidential records have been destroyed by the RNC,” the committee staff reported. “The committee has obtained evidence of potentially extensive violations of the Presidential Records Act by senior White House officials.”
The 1978 law requires the White House to preserve official documents. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who was White House counsel at the time, may have known about the White House aides’ use of the RNC e-mail system, but he took no action to stop destruction of the records, the report said.
A Republican Party spokeswoman dismissed the committee report as “political spin.”
“Not only have we been clear that we are continuing our efforts to search for e-mails, but there is no basis for an assumption that any e-mail not already found would be of an official nature,” party spokeswoman Tracey Schmidt said.
Democrats suggested that White House aides used the back-channel e-mail system to hide potentially embarrassing, or even possibly incriminating, messages - an allegation that White House officials have vehemently denied.
“This administration’s penchant for secrecy and disdain for oversight seems to know no bounds,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “This extensive end-run around the laws leads one to wonder what these officials wanted to hide from the public and Congress.”
Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the House Oversight Committee chairman, said the panel would continue to push for more information on the missing White House e-mails.
White House spokesman Tony Snow declined to respond directly to the staff report, but he defended the use of the Republican Party e-mail system. He said aides used RNC equipment and the e-mail network to comply with federal laws that prohibit the use of government supplies for partisan political activity.
“We’ve seen a number of times right now where people have been putting together investigations to see what sticks. They have had very little success so far. This is an administration that is very careful about obeying the law,” he said.
The use of RNC e-mails by White House aides first drew attention last year during a congressional investigation into convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s White House contacts. In a 2001 e-mail to one of Abramoff’s associates, Ralston, then a Rove aide, seemed to view the RNC system as a way to avoid scrutiny.
“I now have an RNC blackberry which you can use to e-mail me at any time. No security issues like my WH e-mail,” she wrote.
Ralston, who has since left the White House, was questioned under oath by congressional investigators last month, but she refused to discuss White House contacts with Abramoff or White House use of the RNC e-mail system unless she was granted immunity from prosecution.
Brad Berenson, her lawyer, said Ralston feared that her answers could “reasonably form some link in a chain of evidence” pointing to possible wrongdoing. He said Ralston, who wasn’t granted immunity, had done nothing wrong.
The House Oversight Committee released Ralston’s deposition along with the interim staff report.
Margaret Talev contributed.
McClatchy Newspapers 2007
My guess is that the penalty for missing e-mails is much less damaging than the e-mails themselves. So, they decided to go for the lighter charge.
So we need to change the law. Parking ramps understand that there’s an incentive for “losing” your ticket if the penalty for a lost ticket is lower than the maximum daily rate.
So if even parking lot owners have figured out this out, why hasn’t D.C.? Could be that both of the corporate parties occasionally want to cite the dog that ate their homework?
Gore/Nader, Green Party 2008 plus only a few progressive Dems…
The photo looks like a calculator and not a computer keyboard. Anyone else notice that? Maybe its a subliminal message that they are calculating people!
WHY are we not surprised? Shrub has never succeeded at ANY job he ever had. Once an alcoholic or drug addict, ALWAYS an abuser. Obviously, he thinks he is above the law; then again, he most likely does NOT have the ability to THINK! Lying has been rampant of this ENTIRE administration. Logic dictates, “If you have nothing to hide, why not answer ANY questions posed by the media. To pick and choose laws you want to use is obstruction of justice. This fits into high crimes and misdemeanors. WHY is Congress caving to this Neanderthal? The voters clearly said they wanted change. It is time to grow a brass pair and stand up to our bowlegged tyrant. All the incompetence I have seen is enough to make those of us with triple digit IQ’s dumbfounded and depressed, at the very LEAST. Let’s pray the voters send this bunch packing and then bring their rich, fat butts to justice!!!!
Wait, aren’t these the people who had the NSA set up a system to collect ALL of our e-mail, among other communications, ostensibly to keep us safe from harm? And now, they are saying they can’t find millions of e-mails, including about 500 that Greg Palast has shared with Conyers in support of the investigation into illegal use of caging lists to suppress the votes of poor and black people? What’s really missing in this story?
Any e-mail sent from government property has to be government related or else it have violates a different law, the one that outlaws using government resources for private( political) purposes. If the e-mail address, on either end, says .gov then it is automatically a government related e-mail(DUH). So okay,where are the indictments? Special prosecutor? Why does it take an on tv murder by these guys to get the Democrats to call them out. Don’t they realize that a coup has taken place/WTF?
What worries me is that this is a huge story, one I imagine that if it had occurred in the Watergate days would have been front page news and all over the T.V.
But where did I find this story in my local paper, the Akron Beacon Journal? On page A-5 in a little box at the bottom of the page in a small section called, “In the Nation” in about 70 words.
The corruption of this administration once again goes under the radar, and the American people turn over in their sleep oblivious to the another lowering of the bar in terms of the rule of law, the demands of our Constitution, and government by “we the people.”
The law, again, is breeched; we have to IMPEACH!
Rune: Well, either the NSA’s ability to snoop is vastly overrated, the NSA serves only the Republican Party, the Democrats are merely making a charade out of this issue (not actually trying to solve it), or something along these lines.
Of course, the current RFC for e-mail transmissions is that they pass plaintext from router to router on the internet. So something isn’t exactly kosher in the news reporting here.
Considering how stupid and wasteful of tax dollars Bu$h the inferior and the gang are I suppose they have my emails rather than the actual government emails that are supposed to be carefully kept.
Without the emails, how in the world will those future historians know the heights of the greatness of the decider? Why do these guys want to put the bright light of their genius under a basket?
These people know that truth is their top enemy, and that deception is their best friend. When Bush was the governor of Texas he went out of his way to make sure that many facts of what was said & done, would be unavailable to the public. They’ve been doing the same thing in Washington, since the organized criminals in the supreme court gave him the presidency.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Bush+%2B+texas+%2B+secrecy&btnG=Google+Search
The truth (widely circulated and known by the masses) will set us free (from tolerating corrupt politicians and their filthy wars).
You mean we are going to be deprived of one million Presidential fart joke spams?
Wouldn’t it be just great if any ONE of these great investigations were aimed at IMPEACHMENT????
Hello, HENRY….ARE YOU HAVING ANYONE READ THESE FOR YOU???
Your constituents back in California would really like to see you be on the right side of history on this one.
Missing emails “may” have violated the law. Please explain how this government can have records on me that can tell me what may 5th grade report card has on it and they want us to believe that they “lost” all these emails?
Here they go, dangling another carrot in our face when they have a multitude of impeachable crimes in front of them already that they’re doing NOTHING about!
I’m so over hearing what this administration “may” have committed and than listening to the bullshit response from the so-called opposition party. Screw these bastards. Until I see someone ACTUALLY CHARGED WITH SOMETHING AND FOUND QUILTY I’m not biting. This is all just another dog and pony show to make it look like that they’re doing something. They’re not doing anything that needs doing, which is to start impeachment proceedings against this criminal organization.
Just very quickly scanned the article and comments.
OF COURSE IT IS ILLEGAL!
All of the people involved are part of the operation of our government, acting as they do “in official capacity” and their actions and the record thereof are the property of this nation - us, the governed, the electors, the citizens. Failure to preserve the records of their actions as government servants involved in oficial business is an act of gross negligence, or of wanton subversion of government accountability and transparency.
The establishment of lines of communication between government operatives involved in official business hidden from the official record is inherently illegal.
Suspicion is justifiably warranted that this hidden communication network was established to conduct illegal activity. More striking though is the monumental incompetence of the instigators of this stealth web in not realizing just how quickly and completely party business and official business would be conducted in parallel on both the official record and the hidden record, making plausible deniability impossible. The official record can not now be made whole without reference to the hidden communications.
What ass-holes.
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“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it…”
Abraham Lincoln
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The Bush crime family can do no worng when protected by the Penagon.Don’t like it like that,move somewhere else. Love it or leave it.