There's your answer. White House personnel appear to have been systematically avoiding using their government emails on the job because they knew they might some day be subpoenaed.
But as we noted earlier with Karl Rove, this may have been too clever by half. If the president's aides were using RNC emails or emails from other Republican political committees, they can't have even the vaguest claim to shielding those communications behind executive privilege.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/013297.phpWhite House switching to private email.
Via Muckraker, U.S. News reports that “just a week after E-mails in the U.S. attorneys case became a main focus of congressional Democrats probing the firings, several aides said that they stopped using the White House system except for purely professional correspondence.” But rather than use RNC accounts, “they have subsequently bought their own private E-mail system through a cellular phone or Blackberry server. When asked how he communicated, one aide pulled out a new personal cellphone and said, ‘texting.’”
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002894.phpUPDATE II: A Laura Rozen reader notes that other federal agencies have apparently banned this practice over security concerns.
Outside email at the White House. A reader who has a security role at a federal agency writes, "On the issue of using outside/unofficial e-mail address from official sites, the CIO at
has expressly forbade the practice for security reasons as it is all too easy to put sensitive information in an e-mail. ... Needless to say, hearing that the WH does not mandate that practice and lets do 95% of his e-mailing from a blackberry, presumably with access to an unofficial address, is quite shocking. Still find it absolutely amazing that his clearance has not been revoked." If you watched the Waxman hearing with the White House security official on the Plame matter, one might have picked up that essentially that office was terrified of the White House political masters, and didn't dare consider holding them to the kind of security standards most everybody else in the government is held to, out of a desire perhaps for job security.
http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/005895.html
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