The Emails the White House Doesn’t Want You to See
By Dan Schulman
March 30, 2007
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Instead of responding to an email account administered by the Republican National Committee (sralston@georgewbush.com) as he had intended, he sent the message to Ralston’s White House address. The following day Abramoff was alerted to his error by a colleague, Kevin Ring, who’d spoken to a White House official to whom Abramoff’s request had been forwarded. “She said it is better to not put this stuff in writing in their email system because it might actually limit what they can do to help us, especially since there could be lawsuits, etc.,” Ring wrote. Abramoff responded swiftly: “Dammit. It was sent to Susan on her rnc
pager and was not supposed to go into the WH system.”
The significance of this intriguing exchange, which was among thousands of emails reviewed by investigators for the House Government Reform Committee as part of an extensive investigation into Abramoff, might have gone unrecognized had it not been for another scandal, this one involving the abrupt firings of eight U.S. Attorneys. As the controversy intensified in early March and hearings were held, the Department of Justice was forced to release thousands of documents, including email exchanges between Alberto Gonzales’ chief of staff Kyle Sampson, who resigned in mid-March, and Rove deputy J. Scott Jennings.
Here too was evidence that White House officials were conducting business using RNC email accounts, domains such as gwb43.com and rnchq.org. But why? For one, as Abramoff was attempting to do, it is a way of bypassing the White House server and skirting its automatic archiving function, insuring that potentially damaging or incriminating emails will not be preserved for posterity by the National Archives, or worse, come to light through the efforts of a federal prosecutor or congressional investigator. In a March 15 letter to Henry Waxman’s Government Reform Committee, the watchdog group Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington noted that this practice might violate the 1978 Presidential Records Act, which governs how the papers of presidents and their staffs are to be preserved, and urged an investigation. “This refreshed our memory about what we’d seen in the Abramoff emails,” says one Waxman aide.
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But the email controversy may be significance not only to historians who will pour over the Bush papers in years to come, but to others who are working to provide present-day accountability. Indeed, among other people, these revelations could be of particular interest to a certain federal prosecutor who recently won the conviction of the Vice President’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, on charges of obstructing an investigation into the leak of Valerie Wilson’s identity. Contained in the lengthy docket of U.S.A. v. Libby is a January 23, 2006 letter from special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to Libby’s defense team, who were then jousting over classified discovery. In it, Fitzgerald advises Libby’s attorneys, “in an abundance of caution,” that “we have learned that not all email of the Office of Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system.” Though the prosecution later received an additional 250 pages of records from the vice president’s office, it remains unclear what the true nature of this “archiving problem” was or whether Fitzgerald received all of the documents that may have been relevant to his investigation. (Fitzgerald’s office declined to comment after being provided with a detailed request.) Perhaps Fitzgerald, along with other investigators who have sought White House records, was looking in the wrong place. He may want to check the RNC’s servers.
more at:
http://www.motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2007/03/white_house_emails.html
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