Four Years' Worth Of Rove E-Mail Missing

This is like the gift that just keeps on giving.

As I said yesterday I don't think there can be a sentient person on the planet who believes the White House story that they have somehow "lost" the very emails that might indict them in the enquiry into the sacked US Attorneys.

Today the story just took a quantum leap from the sublime to the ridiculous with the news that four year's worth of Karl Rove's email's are "missing". There has to be some part of you that actually laughs at the sheer barefaced gall of these people.

GOP officials took issue with Rep. Henry Waxman's account of the briefing and said they still hope to find the e-mail as they conduct forensic work on their computer equipment. But they acknowledged that they took action to prevent Rove -- and Rove alone among the two dozen or so White House officials with RNC accounts -- from deleting his e-mails from the RNC server. Waxman (D-Calif.) said he was told the RNC made that move in 2005.

In a letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, Waxman said the RNC lawyer, Rob Kelner, also raised the possibility that Rove had personally deleted the missing e-mails, all dating back to before 2005. GOP officials said Kelner was merely speaking hypothetically about why e-mail might be missing for any staffer and not referring to Rove in particular.

Now let's bear in mind that keeping a record of all White House communications is a requirement under law and note that GOP officials are admitting that they have had to take action to prevent Karl Rove - and Karl Rove alone -from deleting his emails from the RNC server. So this guy is presumably disobeying the law so frequently that they have had to take steps to prevent him from doing so.

I'm sorry, do you even have to think about who's behind this? Surely even the most amateur sleuth would begin with the guy who has form?

"What we have done has been forthcoming, honest," spokeswoman Dana Perino said. "We are trying to understand to the best of our ability the universe of the e-mails that were potentially lost, and we are taking steps to make sure that we use the forensics that are available to retrieve any of those that are lost."

Why does Dana Perino keep using the word "lost" when she's talking about the emails of a man who is such a serial deleter of emails that special steps have had to be taken to prevent him from doing so? I mean talk about looking at the spent matches, the empty gas can and the flames and ignoring the fact that guy at the front is a serial arsonist.

Does Dana Perino want someone to draw her a map?

Republican officials also said there was nothing nefarious in their decision to take precautions to preserve Rove's e-mail. According to Waxman, Kelner told his staff that the RNC commenced a program in 2005 that took away Rove's ability to personally delete his e-mails. GOP officials said that was done only to preserve records for possible use in legal settings, not out of any concern that Rove would seek to scrub his e-mail account.

And yet, Karl Rove - the only person that they took these curious precautions over - is the very man who has lost four years worth of email in the exact years preceding the implementation of this policy. If someone at the GOP did that on a hunch, rather than a genuine suspicion, then that bugger should fill out a lottery ticket ASAP. They have got some seriously psychic vibes going on.

Oh, and these mysterious "losses" are not confined to emails on the RNC servers, these mysterious disappearing acts are occurring to White House email as well:

In a startling new revelation, CREW has also learned through two confidential sources that the Executive Office of the President (EOP) has lost over five million emails generated between March 2003 and October 2005. The White House counsel’s office was advised of these problems in 2005 and CREW has been told that the White House was given a plan of action to recover these emails, but to date nothing has been done to rectify this significant loss of records.

Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW, summed it up perfectly when she said:

“It’s clear that the White House has been willfully violating the law, the only question now is to what extent? The ever changing excuses offered by the administration – that they didn’t want to violate the Hatch Act, that staff wasn’t clear on the law – are patently ridiculous. Very convenient that embarrassing – and potentially incriminating – emails have gone missing. It’s the Nixon White House all over again.”

Five million missing emails and - to date - nothing has been done to rectify this. Hmmm, it's almost like they don't want to find them.

Over at Or How I learned To Stop Worrying, Mash has compiled a list of questions that need to be asked:

• Were Rove and company using their special laptops on the White House LAN? If so, what is the White House policy on connecting non-government computers to the White House LAN? Is that considered a breach of security?
• If the "special laptops" were using the White House LAN, then emails sent and/or received by those laptops would have had to go through the White House firewall before going out to the internet. Shouldn’t someone look at the firewall logs to determine how many emails were sent out and/or received from these laptops and to which IP addresses? Does the White House firewall log all content that passes through it? If so, someone should retrieve the emails from the firewall logs.
• If these special laptops did not plug into the White House LAN, did Rove and company use a wireless public network (like Verizon Wireless) from inside the White House to send/receive official White House communications to outside parties? Is that considered a breach of security in the White House?
• Were any of the emails sent from these special laptops, through gwb43.com, internal White House communications between White House staffers? If so, has internal White House deliberations been compromised by the communications being sent out over the public internet?
• Does the email server at gwb43.com do regular backups? If so, someone should pull the backup tapes from the relevant time period to retrieve the "deleted" emails.

It is known that the White House have already made the very generous offer of providing a limited set of documents. The White House has also proposed allowing Rove and other aides to be interviewed privately, without a transcript and not under oath.

Such truculence suggests that they have no wish to ever find some of these emails for, as Mash rightly points out, if they want to find them, they'll be there.

This reminds me of another time in American history, actually it was only about eighteen minutes of American history, but I just can't put my finger on it.

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Tags: Rove, missing emails, fired Attorney's, White House, Gonzales, Perino, Bush, Waxman