Thread: Bush Looks to His (Secret) Legacy

Bush Looks to His (Secret) Legacy

By Jason Leopold
July 11, 2008

George W. Bush, who has expanded his power to access the e-mails and other electronic communications of Americans, is resisting congressional demands that White House e-mails be saved for later research by historians.

Bush signaled he would veto a House-passed bill that seeks to overhaul the Presidential and Federal Records Act to ensure that e-mails and other government documents are preserved in the age of the Internet.

The measure passed the House, 286-137, on Wednesday, after congressional investigations revealed that the Bush administration apparently purged millions of e-mails and that dozens of administration officials used e-mail accounts maintained by the Republican National Committee to conduct official White House business and thus evade federal records laws.

Watchdog groups -- Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, and George Washington University’s National Security Archive -- sued the administration last year alleging the White House violated the Presidential Records Act by not archiving e-mails sent and received between 2003 and 2005.

The Bush administration, in threatening to veto the legislation, said the bill is "an excessive and inappropriate intrusion" into the work of the Executive Branch and its staff.

In a statement, the White House said the Electronic Message Preservation Act would "upset the delicate separation of powers" created in the 1978 Presidential Records Act, a law drafted in response to the widespread abuse of federal records during the Nixon administration.

The Presidential Records Act states that the records of a President, his immediate staff and specific areas of the Executive Office of the President belong to the United States, not to the individual President or his staff.

The act further states that the President must "take all such steps as may be necessary to assure that the activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of his constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties are adequately documented."

By coincidence, Bush issued his veto threat – against this legislative “intrusionâ€

As far as I'm concerned, Bush's legacy is GUARANTEED to be TAINTED, especially with his ABJECT DENIAL of clemency to the UNJUSTLY imprisoned Border Patrol Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean!