You've Got RNC Mail

I've been following but not writing about this related scandal to the US Attorney purge, which concerns the fact that many White House communications are coming from RNC email servers instead of those from the White House, which is a violation of the Presidential Records Act.

Apparently this has become standard practice, and while it sounds like an inside baseball thing, it's just an extension of the secrecy under which this White House operates.

White House staff are using non-governmental e-mail addresses to avoid leaving a paper trail of their communications, a senior congressman charged Monday.

In a pair of letters Monday, House Oversight and Investigations Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman, D.-Calif., asked the Republican National Committee and the Bush-Cheney '04 Campaign to preserve e-mails sent and received by White House officials using domains controlled by the two groups [...]

"Such e-mails written in the conduct of White House business would appear to be governmental records subject to preservation and eventual public disclosure," Waxman wrote.

The use of e-mail addresses from domains like "gwb43.com" by White House aides surfaced in the news earlier this month when the Justice Department released hundreds of e-mails between political appointees discussing the firing of several U.S. attorneys. E-mails from Scott Jennings, a deputy to White House political adviser Karl Rove, came from an address featuring the gwb43.com domain.

But Waxman also pointed to e-mails his committee received last year in connection to convicted superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, which show White House aides sending and receiving work-related e-mails from domains like "georgewbush.com" and "rnchq.org".

It appears that the White House deliberately went off the grid because they knew internal emails could be subpoenaed. Rep. Waxman has made public emails that circumvent the White House communications system that he uncovered during the US Attorney probe, but also the Jack Abramoff investigation, and emails sent to the General Services Administration, which is a target for holding meetings on helping Republican candidates in 2008 with taxpayer dollars.

Apparently Karl Rove sends 95% of his email on RNC servers, yet the White House is paying him to do that. Rove's top aide, Susan Ralston, was walking around with an RNC Blackberry. This is a security issue as well, since the RNC servers are not as locked up as the ones in the White House, and could be subject to spying from foreign intelligence agencies. And in the end, this won't help White House staffers avoid scrutiny as easily as they thought:

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.

Now Rep. Waxman is asking for all RNC emails regarding the General Services Administration probe, and he'll get them. This was a stupid idea from an executive branch obsessed with secrecy, and it won't even achieve the stated purpose. And it's against the law, but that's almost expected at this point.