A Culture of Deniability By Dan Froomkin ==WaPo

[Demeter]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/03/15/BL2007031501053.html?referrer=email&referrer=email&referrer=email&referrer=email&referrer=email

A Culture of Deniability

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, March 15, 2007; 4:12 PM

.... in spite of the embarrassing revelations contained in the e-mails turned over by the Justice Department to the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, the general rule at the White House is that if it's really sensitive, don't put it in writing -- certainly not in an e-mail.

That stuff gets archived.

The president himself, for instance, never uses e-mail at all.

And it now turns out that some of his aides sometimes avoid using their official White House e-mail accounts -- the ones that get automatically archived.

As I wrote in yesterday's column, Tuesday's document dump -- which initiated from the Justice Department, not the White House -- includes e-mails from J. Scott Jennings, Karl Rove's deputy at the White House, coming from an e-mail address at gwb43.com. That's a domain owned by the Republican National Committee.

This raises all sorts of questions. I put four of them to a White House spokesman yesterday, but haven't gotten a response.

The questions:

1) Does White House policy allow White House staffers to use non-White House e-mail addresses for official White House business? Does it prohibit it? What is the policy?

2) Would these e-mails be treated any differently from official White House e-mails when it comes to archiving or subpoena purposes?

3) Does it create either impropriety or the appearance of impropriety that gwb43.com is a domain owned by the Republican National Committee?

4) Do other White House staffers regularly use non-White House e-mail accounts for White House business, and if so, why?

Since then, several readers have e-mailed me with their own questions and comments. So I've added four more, passed those along as well, and still no response:

5) Does non-White House e-mail fulfill security requirements for White House communications?

6) If other non-White House e-mail accounts are used, who are the providers for all of the other accounts? (Any others besides the RNC?)

7) Does White House policy allow White House staffers to use non-White House e-mail addresses from their computers, even for non-official business? I'm told that during the Clinton administration, access to external e-mail, including Web mail, was shut off from White House (eop.gov) computers. Was there a conscious change of policy by the Bush administration?

8) Have there been any recent changes in policy relating to e-mail practices, or are changes in policy contemplated?

It's my understanding that the Presidential Records Act covers staff e-mails -- no matter what domain they come from -- as long as they are generated "in the course of conducting activities which relate to or have an effect upon the carrying out of the constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President."



Not an Isolated Incident

The use of RNC e-mail by White House staffers is apparently is not entirely unusual.

Also in Tuesday's document dump was a Jan. 8, 2007 e-mail from Steve Bell, the chief of staff to Sen. Pete Domenici, about the senator's preferred replacement for fired U.S. attorney David Iglesias. Bell sent that e-mail to three people -- including one "[e-mail]".

I wonder who that was.

I called Bell this morning to get a sense of whether the official and political e-mail addresses of White House aides are widely considered to be interchangeable.

"I don't know how they . . . I don't know which is . . . I'm not going to comment on it," Bell said.

And consider this: copies of e-mails between now-convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Susan Ralston, then an assistant to Karl Rove, showed her using a variety of e-mail addresses at georgewbush.com, rnchq.com and aol.com.
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Cover-Up Exposed?

Will this be the nail in Gonzales's coffin?

Murray Waas writes today for the National Journal:


"Shortly before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales advised President Bush last year on whether to shut down a Justice Department inquiry regarding the administration's warrantless domestic eavesdropping program, Gonzales learned that his own conduct would likely be a focus of the investigation, according to government records and interviews. . . .

"Bush personally intervened to sideline the Justice Department probe in April 2006 by taking the unusual step of denying investigators the security clearances necessary for their work. . . .

"Sources familiar with the halted inquiry said that if the probe had been allowed to continue, it would have examined Gonzales's role in authorizing the eavesdropping program while he was White House counsel, as well as his subsequent oversight of the program as attorney general."

Waas writes that it isn't clear if Bush knew Gonzales was a potential target of the probe when he intervened. But either way, this is ugly.

If Gonzales told the president he wanted the probe quashed because he himself was in the crosshairs, then you've potentially got Bush personally involved in a cover-up to help his friend. If Gonzales didn't tell Bush that he was a potential target, then the attorney general may have abused his office and misled the president.

Bush's intervention -- though not Gonzales's apparent personal jeopardy -- was first disclosed in July. As I groused in my July 19, 2006 column, it never made the front pages of major newspapers (and then dropped off the radar entirely) even though, as I wrote: "It is not common for a president to personally intervene to stop an investigation of his own administration. The most notorious case, of course, was the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, during which President Richard Nixon ordered the firing of Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor who had been appointed to investigate the Watergate scandal."

But now, with Gonzales on the ropes and Congress back in the business of oversight, this could simply turn out to be a cover-up with a very long fuse.

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Richard A. Serrano writes in the Los Angeles Times: "The day news broke that a federal corruption probe in Southern California was spreading to Republican Rep. Jerry Lewis, the chief of staff to Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales fired off an e-mail to the White House about the federal prosecutor who had begun the investigation.

"'The real problem we have right now is Carol Lam,' D. Kyle Sampson told White House Deputy Counsel William Kelley on May 11. 'That leads me to conclude that we should have someone ready to be nominated 11/18, the day her 4-year term expires.'"