The Case of the Missing Emails

The latest report is that the White House lost over 5 million emails in a two-year period, which isn't a heck of a lot when you think about your own email usage and then multiply it by an entire office of people who are manic obsessives, BUT... these are emails from the Executive Office of the President and it's actually the law that they are to be preserved, in accordance with the Presidential Reocrds Act. So not only are White House staffers going offline to do their secret dealings by using RNC email servers, they're purging the emails that are ONLINE.

Furthermore, the RNC instituted a "document retention" policy under which all emails were supposed to be preserved, particularly Karl Rove's, as Patrick Fitzgerald asked that this be done during the CIA Leak investigation. But even still Rove was deleting his emails up a storm.

Mr. Kelner's briefing raised particular concems about Karl Rove, who according to press reports used his RNC accountfor 95%o of his communications. According to Mr. Kelner, although the hold started in August 2004, the RNC does not have any e-mails prior to 2005 for Mr. Rove. Mr. Kelner did not give any explanation for the e-mails missing from Mr. Rove's account, but he did acknowledge that one possible explanation is that Mr. Rove personally deleted his e-mails from the RNC server.

Mr. Kelner also explained that starting in 2005, the RNC began to treat Mr. Rove's emails in a special fashion. At some point in 2005, the RNC commenced an automatic archive policy for Mr. Rove, but not for any other White House officials. According to Mr. Kelner, this archive policy removed Mr. Rove's ability to personally delete his e-mails from the RNC server. Mr. Kelner did not provide many details about why this special policy was adopted for Mr. Rove. But he did indicate that one factor was the presence of investigative or discovery requests or other legal concerns. It was unclear from Mr. Kelner's briefing whether the special archiving policy for Mr. Rove was consistently in effect after 2005.

And as if we had to guess, the New York Times is reporting that the missing emails may be related to the firing of the US Attorneys. Ya think? That was the whole point! The missing links in the paper trail are all emails to the White House about various prosecutors, meetings, et al. And now even the White House is acknowledging the "mistake," still sticking to the story that email can vanish when everyone knows it can't. And they're also sticking to the notion of executive privilege, even for email that comes out of the RNC (I guess that's party privilege):

It also exposed the dual electronic lives led by Mr. Rove and 21 other White House officials who maintain separate e-mail accounts for government business and work on political campaigns — and raised serious questions, in the eyes of Democrats, about whether political accounts were used to conduct official work without leaving a paper trail.

The clash also seemed to push the White House and Democrats closer to a serious confrontation over executive privilege, with the White House counsel, Fred F. Fielding, asserting that the administration has control over countless other e-mail messages that the Republican National Committee has archived. Democrats are insisting that they are entitled to get the e-mail messages directly from the national committee.

In a letter to Mr. Leahy and Representative John Conyers Jr., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Fielding, the White House counsel, said the administration was prepared to produce e-mail from the national committee, but only as part of a “carefully and thoughtfully considered package of accommodations” — in other words, only as part of the offer for Mr. Rove and the others to appear in private.

Mr. Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, issued a tart reply: “The White House position seems to be that executive privilege not only applies in the Oval Office, but to the R.N.C. as well. There is absolutely no basis in law or fact for such a claim.”

Ben Smith at The Politico has more.

We are moving into uncharted territory here with this scandal, and the press has been spending the entire week talking about Imus getting fired. They need to get their eyes back on the ball. The White House is acknowledging that they broke the law, and is refusing to comply with a Congressional subpoena. Keep your eyes on the ball, people. There's a Constitutional crisis under your noses and you don't even know it.

More tomorrow.