Thread: GOP E-Mails Missing, House Panel Says

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GOP E-Mails Missing, House Panel Says
By CHARLES BABINGTON
AP
WASHINGTON (June 19) - E-mail records are missing for 51 of the 88 White House officials who had electronic message accounts with the Republican National Committee, the House Oversight Committee said Monday.

The Bush administration may have committed "extensive" violations of a law requiring that certain records be preserved, said the committee's Democratic chairman, adding that the panel will deepen its probe into the use of political e-mail accounts.

The committee's interim report said the number of White House officials who had RNC e-mail accounts, and the number of messages they sent and received, were more extensive than previously realized.

The administration has said that about 50 White House officials had RNC e-mail accounts during Bush's presidency. But the House committee found at least 88.

The RNC has preserved e-mails from some of the heaviest users, including 140,216 messages sent or received by Bush's top political adviser in the White House, Karl Rove . However, "the RNC has preserved no e-mails for 51 officials," said the interim report, issued by committee chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif.

The 51 include Ken Mehlman, a former White House political director who reportedly used his RNC account frequently, the report said.

"Given the heavy reliance by White House officials on RNC e-mail accounts, the high rank of the White House officials involved, and the large quantity of missing e-mails," the report said, "the potential violation of the Presidential Records Act may be extensive."


The records act requires presidents to assure that "the activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance" of their duties are "adequately documented ... and maintained," the report said.

White House press secretary Tony Snow told reporters he would not "respond specifically" to the committee's findings but said the RNC e-mail accounts "were designed precisely to avoid Hatch Act violations that prohibit the use of government assets for certain political activities." He added, "the RNC has had an e-mail preservation policy for White House staffers."

Congressional Democrats are investigating whether White House officials used RNC e-mail accounts to conduct overtly political, and perhaps improper, activities such as planning which U.S. prosecutors to fire and preparing partisan briefings for employees in federal agencies.

Waxman's committee is contacting numerous federal agencies to determine whether their records "contain some of the White House e-mails that have been destroyed by the RNC," the report said.

In a statement, Waxman said the panel's findings "should be a matter of grave concern for anyone who values open government." He said the committee will investigate "who knew about the violations of the Presidential Records Act, why they did not act earlier, and what e-mails can be salvaged from RNC, White House, and agency computer systems."

The committee's top Republican, Tom Davis of Virginia, criticized the report, saying the panel should obtain more conclusive evidence before accusing the RNC and White House of wrongdoing. The evidence thus far, he said, "simply does not support the report's breathless conclusions."

Tracey Schmitt, a spokeswoman for the RNC, said the report appears to present Democrats' partisan spin as fact.

"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," she said.

The report especially criticized Alberto Gonzales, now the attorney general, for actions when he headed the White House Counsel's office. There is evidence that under Gonzales the office "may have known that White House officials were using RNC e-mail accounts for official business, but took no action to preserve these presidential records," the report said.

Snow said of the claim: "That's an allegation. We'll respond to it in due course."

The report said the House committee may need to issue subpoenas "to obtain the cooperation of the Bush Cheney '04 campaign." It said the campaign acknowledges providing e-mail accounts "to 11 White House officials, but the campaign has unjustifiably refused to provide the committee with basic information about these accounts, such as the identity of the White House officials and the number of e-mails that have been preserved.

Eric Kuwana, the Bush-Cheney campaign's counsel, said the requested documents "have no articulated connection" to the panel's investigation "and very well may be the type and nature of political documents that are specifically exempt from the Presidential Records Act."

The House committee report said Rove's RNC e-mail account carried 75,374 messages to or from people with government, or .gov, accounts. It said the RNC has preserved 66,018 e-mails sent to or from former White House political affairs director Sara Taylor, and 35,198 sent to or from deputy director Scott Jennings.

"These e-mail accounts were used by White House officials for official purposes, such as communicating with federal agencies about federal appointments and policies," the report said.

It said the White House counsel in early 2001 "issued clear written policies" instructing staffers "to use only the official White House e-mail system for official communications and to retain any official e-mails they received on a nongovernmental account." Recent evidence "indicates that White House officials used their RNC e-mail accounts in a manner that circumvented these requirements," the report said.

Snow said of the claim: "That's an allegation. We'll respond to it in due course."

TRANSLATION: "Being as no one cares about it right now, we'll make up that lie when the sh*# really hits the fan."

More lies and cover ups. Gee that's a surprise.

House Committee: Presidential Records Act Broken
By Matt Renner


Tuesday 19 June 2007
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/061907J.shtml


A report issued by the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Monday claims that there have been wide-spread violations of the Presidential Records Act (PRA) by numerous officials in the Bush Administration since 2001.

The report concluded that "[t]hese violations could be the most serious breach of the PRA in the 30-year history of the law."

The Presidential Records Act of 1978 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, "the president shall 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 and that such records are maintained as presidential records pursuant to the requirements of this section and other provisions of law."

The Chairman of the Oversight Committee, Representative Henry Waxman (D-California) issued a statement about the findings of the report. He said, "We now know that senior officials in the White House made extensive use of their [unofficial] Republican National Committee (RNC) email accounts; that these accounts were used for official communications; and that the RNC destroyed an enormous volume of these communications."

Despite the conclusions of the report, it is not yet clear whether Congress is willing to use its subpoena power and fight the Bush Administration in court. A spokesperson for Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said that they are in full support of the investigations and the actions taken by the Democratic Committee chairmen.

Watchdog lawyer Anne Weismann said that Congress should act more aggressively. "The White House is running out the clock. Congress has subpoena power. They could subpoena the White House. They could pass legislation that ties the White House's budget to their compliance with archiving procedures. It is time they bring out the big guns because the White House has every incentive to delay," Weismann said. Weismann's organization, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, has been tracking the Bush Administration's non-compliance with presidential archiving procedures.

The Committee report, titled "Investigation of Possible Presidential Records Act Violations," is based on an ongoing investigation that was initiated shortly after the Democrats gained control of Congress. The report contrasts the stated email policies of the Bush Administration with documented evidence that at least 88 White House officials held unofficial, unarchived email accounts. Evidence that these accounts were used for official business, a direct violation of the law, is also provided. The report points out that the Bush Administration's response to this issue underrepresented the number of White House officials involved. Dana Perino, spokesperson for the White House, said that a "handful of officials" used RNC email accounts. Perino made a subsequent estimate of "50 [individuals] over the course of the administration" who held RNC accounts.

According to the RNC, of the known 88 Bush Administration officials who held RNC accounts, documents exist for only 37 of them. The records that do exist were proved incomplete by the Congressional investigators. The report states that, "Whether intentionally or inadvertently, it appears that the RNC has destroyed a large volume of the emails of the White House officials." According to the RNC, it had a "document retention" policy under which they erased emails from their servers after 30 days. The RNC policy did not prevent users from accessing the server and manually deleting their email. The report states that "as a result of these policies, potentially hundreds of thousands of White House emails have been destroyed."

The White House staff manual contains a February 26, 2001, memorandum from then Counsel to the President Alberto Gonzales which stated that "email is no different from other kinds of documents. Any email relating to official business therefore qualifies as a Presidential record... [I]f you happen to receive an email on a personal email account that otherwise qualifies as a Presidential record, it is your duty to ensure that it is preserved and filed as such by printing it out and saving it or by forwarding it to your White House email account." The report states that Gonzales may have known about violations of White House email policy by Presidential Advisor Karl Rove, who, according to the Republican National Committee, often sent more than 100 emails and received over 200 emails per day using his RNC account in 2007. In a sworn deposition to congressional investigators, former Aide to Rove Susan Ralston said that the White House Counsel's office knew about Rove's violation of email policy as far back as 2001, when his email was searched in connection with investigations into the Enron scandal and the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson's identity. According to Ralston, "all of the documents that we collected [for investigators] were then turned over to the White House Counsel's office."

In addressing this apparent discrepancy, the report suggests that Gonzales may have been complicit in the destruction of Rove's email records: "former White House Counsel Gonzales may have been aware in 2001 that Mr. Rove was using RNC email accounts for official communications. Yet it was not until six years later that the White House wrote to the RNC instructing them to preserve any 'emails or documents that may relate to the official business of the Executive Office of the President that may be in the possession of the RNC.'"

This is not the first time Gonzales has been accused of complicity in the destruction of White House records that were sought by investigators. When Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald began his investigation into the leak of Plame Wilson's identity, then White House Counsel Gonzales informed Bush's Chief of Staff Andrew Card that the Department of Justice was investigating the issue immediately but waited 12 hours before officially notifying other White House staff to preserve all of their documents. Democrats later questioned whether Card or Gonzales had informed anyone else of the impending order to preserve documents, allowing them time to destroy evidence.

Many top-level White House officials were cited by the report for their use of these RNC email addresses, including Presidential Adviser Karl Rove, former Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and former Counselor to the President Dan Bartlett. The RNC emails were also used by every person to hold the position of Director of Political Affairs under the Bush Administration, including Sara Taylor, who was recently subpoenaed by the Senate Judiciary Committee as part of their investigation into the firing of nine US attorneys.

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) said, "Now that we know more than 100,000 of Mr. Rove's secret emails have not been destroyed, I hope the White House will respond to my request for any emails from his account that are relevant to the Judiciary Committee's investigation," adding, "I look forward to Ms. Taylor searching the thousands of emails from her account in accordance with a subpoena she was issued last week."

According to information given to Waxman's Committee, the RNC has possession of 140,216 emails from Rove's account and 66,018 emails from Taylor's. The White House sought preemptive access to these and other RNC emails and has not yet turned the emails over to congressional investigators. House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Michigan) sent a letter to the RNC requesting emails relating to the US attorney firing scandal. The White House intervened, threatening to invoke claims of executive privilege to prevent Congress from acquiring the documents.

Inherent in a claim of executive privilege would be an admission of a violation of the Presidential Records Act. Ohio State Law Professor Peter Shane described the situation as a legal "catch-22" for the Bush Administration. Shane said previously, "If they say that the subject matter of these communications makes them susceptible to executive privilege claims, then they should have been sent through official government channels, not through unofficial emails. If these communications are of this kind, the Bush Administration is clearly in violation of the Presidential Records Act."