Officials' E-mail May Be Missing, White House Says

The White House said Wednesday that it may have lost what could amount to thousands of messages sent through a private e-mail system used by political guru Karl Rove and at least 50 other top officials, an admission that stirred anger and dismay among congressional investigators.

The e-mails were considered potentially crucial evidence in congressional inquiries launched by Democrats into the role partisan politics may have played in such policy decisions as the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

The White House said an effort was underway to see whether the messages could be recovered from the computer system, which was operated and paid for by the Republican National Committee as part of an avowed effort to separate political communications from those dealing with official business.

"The White House has not done a good enough job overseeing staff using political e-mail accounts to assure compliance with the Presidential Records Act," White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said in an unusual late-afternoon teleconference with reporters.

As a result, Stanzel said, "we may not have preserved all e-mails that deal with White House business."

Is there a single sentient human being who finds that remotely plausible? The very emails that might indict members of this White House have mysteriously disappeared. Rove is now becoming positively Nixonian in his attempts to evade justice, and the Bush regime have given up any last vestige of pretending to care what the public think.

It's a claim that is so blatantly designed to evade justice that the police should march into the White House and seize the computers.

The e-mails were sent through a communications system created in conjunction with the RNC early in the Bush administration. Rove and others were given special laptop computers and other communications devices to use instead of the government communications system when dealing with political matters.

The parallel system was designed to avoid running afoul of the Hatch Act, which prohibits using government resources for partisan purposes, White House officials have said.

But evidence has emerged that system users sometimes failed to maintain such separation and used the private system when communicating about government business.

For example, before the U.S. attorneys were fired, a Rove deputy used an account maintained by the Republican National Committee in discussions with Justice Department officials about replacing some of the regional prosecutors. One e-mail requested a meeting between top officials at the Justice Department and a member of President Bush's campaign team to discuss one U.S. attorney who was among those to be fired.

The Justice Department turned over those e-mails at the request of several congressional committees.

The further problem here is that, in the wake of President Nixon's blatant disregard for the law, a type of behaviour that this White House seem to want to emulate, compliance with the Presidential Records Act, which was passed in 1978, insists that all communications must be kept for historical and investigative purposes.

But, as with Nixon, I think the cover-up will cause them more trouble in the long run. If this story is fabricated for political convenience, eventually someone will step forward and talk.

"This is a remarkable admission that raises serious legal and security issues," said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which is investigating the role of electoral politics in administration policymaking. "The White House has an obligation to disclose all the information it has."

I'll say it's remarkable. It's remarkably bloody convenient and I don't believe it for a second.

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UPDATE:

As Glenn Greenwald points out, this administration has a long habit of losing things it finds politically inconvenient.

I suppose the defense for Bush followers who want to claim that all of this is completely innocent is "extreme ineptitude."

-- Glenn Greenwald

Tags: Rove, Waxman, Gonzales, fired US Attorney's, Bush, congressional investigation