Our Bad

The White House is now resorting to the excuse that didn't work for me in fourth grade, so good luck to them:

The White House said Wednesday that it may have lost what could amount to thousands of messages sent through a private e-mail system used by political guru Karl Rove and at least 50 other top officials, an admission that stirred anger and dismay among congressional investigators.

The e-mails were considered potentially crucial evidence in congressional inquiries launched by Democrats into the role partisan politics may have played in such policy decisions as the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

The White House said an effort was underway to see whether the messages could be recovered from the computer system, which was operated and paid for by the Republican National Committee as part of an avowed effort to separate political communications from those dealing with official business.

"The White House has not done a good enough job overseeing staff using political e-mail accounts to assure compliance with the Presidential Records Act," White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said in an unusual late-afternoon teleconference with reporters.

I'm sure it's a herculean effort to find those emails. I also like how the spokesman is admitting to breaking the law here. He must be new.

There's no way to positively spin this. It's the equivalent of an 18-minute gap, with the added element that you can't really lose emails, and anyone who isn't technically illiterate knows that (and even those people will know that soon, because Democratic leaders are speaking up about it).

President Bush's aides are lying about White House e-mails sent on a Republican account that might have been lost, a powerful Senate chairman said Thursday, vowing to subpoena those documents if the administration fails to cough them up.

"They say they have not been preserved. I don't believe that!" Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy shouted from the Senate floor.

"You can't erase e-mails, not today. They've gone through too many servers," said Leahy, D-Vt. "Those e-mails are there, they just don't want to produce them. We'll subpoena them if necessary."

Of course, the rubber hits the road with the fact that only the US Attorney for the District of Columbia can prosecute a contempt of Congress charge, which is where the White House is headed with their stonewalling. So even while they're backed into a corner, there's still a way out for this Administration. Unless the Congress really wants to do something about it.

We again have an executive branch that believes the law does not apply to them. When this is all over, the most important thing that'll need to be done is to re-establish the rule of law so something like this can never, ever happen again.