Speaking of Those Emails

District Judge Ellen Huvelle of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled Thursday that the DNC does not have a right under the Freedom of Information Act to 68 pages of e-mails sent between White House and Justice Department officials simply because the White House e-mail traffic was transmitted on a server controlled by the Republican National Committee.

The DNC sued the Justice Department in April 2007 after its FOIA request for the e-mails, which relate to the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, was not granted by DOJ. Attorneys for the DNC argued that since the White House officials used "GWB43.com" e-mail addresses to send the messages, they cannot be deemed to be official in nature and therefore must be turned over under the DNC's FOIA request.

[...]

Huvelle noted she wasn't asked to rule on whether the White House violated the Presidential Records Act, only whether the e-mails were exempted from FOIA requests because of their content. Huvelle, in fact, said the failure to save the e-mails from the White House officials was "an apparently flagrant violation" of the Presidential Records Act.

  Politico

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Missing Emails

In response to a fine comment in an earlier post, I did a quick search for what's become of the demand for the White House to produce emails, and found that they've apparently "lost" many of them by not backing up hard drives before replacing and destroying them.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Blackberry Raspberry

Appropriate, if ironic: lawmakers around the country are being bitten by the same lack of privacy so many of them advocate for the lowly citizenry. Not through wiretapping, but through their emails.

Emails and text-messages have now brought down one of the most powerful prosecutors in the country and may soon lead to criminal charges against the Mayor of Detroit. Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal resigned this week after his emails were revealed in a police abuse case. In the meantime, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has appealed the release of his text messages in a case involving police whistleblowers.

  Jonathan Turley

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Meanwhile in Texas

Harris County government chief Ed Emmett today called for Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott's staff to conduct an independent investigation of local District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal in the wake of the disclosure of e-mails on Rosenthal's county government account containing racist jokes, campaign activity and sexually explicit videos.

  Houston Chronicle

The agency that would normally conduct the investigation, the County Attorney, is currently representing Rosenthal in the lawsuit which led to the discovery of the e-mails and which was filed by two guys who were arrested after filming police raiding their neighbor .

Some people actually want Rosenthal to step down, but he says he’s not budging because he’s “done nothing wrong,” although he will not seek re-election. Probably just as well.

And soon, we may be getting a look at what Governor Rick Perry has been doing on his e-mail account, too. At least those that he hadn’t already deleted in his regular account cleanings.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

And Who'll Challenge Them?

TPM Muckraker has a story that shouldn't surprise you.

We noted two weeks ago that the Bush administration had refused a Freedom of Information Act request for records concerning the loss of millions of White House emails. Justice Department lawyers argued that the office which maintained that information, the Office of Administration, was not subject to FOIA.

But sometimes the administration surprises even itself with its capacity for secrecy. And so it was here, since the White House website clearly stated that the Office of Administration was subject to FOIA. And the office had been busily fulfilling FOIA requests for years, even employing a FOIA officer (the Department lawyers explained in their filing that this wasn't a problem).

So, are they forking over the documents? Fat chance! They've simply updated their website to reflect their claim.

Hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Chalk Up Another One

Add the nation's drug czar to the list of agency appointees politicking for the Republican Party.

[Drug] czar, John Walters, and his deputies traveled on the taxpayers' dime to 20 events with vulnerable Republican members of Congress in the months prior to the 2006 elections, according to a committee press release. Not only that, but several of the trips were "combined with the announcement of federal grants or actions that benefited the districts of the Republican members." If government officials were using government funds to help elect Republicans, that would be a violation of the Hatch Act.

[House oversight committee chair Henry] Waxman has uncovered emails [...] that show the White House's enthusiasm for using agency heads as political props. Among them is an email that describes a proud Karl Rove boasting after the 2006 election that the drug czar's office and officials from the departments of Commerce, Transportation, and Agriculture had gone "above and beyond the call of duty" in making "surrogate appearances."

  TPM Muckraker

That's why they don't want to release emails and why they hide emails on a GOP server.

I'd say you'd be pretty safe in assuming all federal agencies to which Bush has appointed a director have been/are being used for political purposes. If you assume that, I won't have to keep posting about it, and we'll just call it done.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Update: The House Judiciary issued new subpoenas for emails from the GOP servers last week. Yeah. Like that's gonna do any good.

...but hey...

Further Update 7/24/07: A list of federal agencies put on notice by Karl Rove to serve the GOP is at TPM here.

Missing Emails

Who were some of those people whose emails the RNC did not keep? Ken Mehlman, RNC bigwig and once head of the WH political office, for one.

And it seems that Karl Rove's emails are missing in gaps.

Rove's defense: I lost my Blackberry. One of them. At least one of them. Oops. My bad.

As far as Rove's little problem goes, his former aide Susan Ralston (who recently resigned) testified:

Based on communications with the RNC or the Bush re-election campaign, “my general understanding was that he [Rove] thought that the emails were being preserved,” Ralston said in a private deposition to committee staff on May 10.

Those conversations often occurred when Rove got an equipment replacement. “I can’t say specifically, but it seemed to be a number of times,” Ralston testified. “Karl would get a new computer. He would lose a BlackBerry. Whenever this happened, there would be some conversation with the [RNC] people about his mail file.”

No doubt.

With a little experience now in the IT field having to transfer files and accounts to new staff computers, I will say that switching email accounts to new operating systems, even within the same manufacturer (you know who you are, Microsoft), can be a real pain in the ass, but saving the files shouldn't be a problem. If they can't manage it, maybe they should all switch to Yahoo.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Distraction

Could it be those missing emails that needed a terror threat for distraction? Keith Olbermann (via Raw Story) has email detail and discusses the seriousness.

Missing Emails

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has released a report confirming that thousands of emails from WH officials going through the RNC servers have been "extensively destroyed." Apparently not just randomly.

Fifty-one of the 88 users of the RNC email service have had their emails wiped. The report also says that Alberto Gonzales, when serving as WH counsel, likely knew Karl Rove was using the RNC email service for official business and did nothing to keep those records as required by law.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

I suppose we will be hearing more.

CREW Sues For Missing Emails

"The White House has decided to play an unlawful game of high-tech hide and seek with the American public," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, in the release.

Last month, CREW filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking the White House's Office of Administration to turn over records related to the millions of e-mails the watchdog says were lost between March 2003 and October 2005.

[...]

"Thus far, CREW has learned that the administration has both lost five million White House emails and pro-actively tried to cover up the loss," Sloan said. "CREW has sued the Office of Administration to shine a spotlight on these reckless and possibly illegal activities and to restore these records for the benefit of future generations."

  Raw Story

Purge

Lawmakers investigating last year's firings of eight U.S. attorneys took aim at the White House on Wednesday, subpoenaing the Justice Department for all related e-mails of President Bush's political adviser Karl Rove.

  McClatchy article

Yeah, good luck with that. Getting those emails has been working so well so far, eh?

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Election Fraud

On November 3, 2004 -- the day before election day -- the Hosting History [of the Ohio Secretary of State’s webpage] reports a switch from OARnet to Smartech Corporation of Chattanooga, Tennessee. The hosting switches back to OARnet on November 5, 2004 -- the day after the election.

  Cannonfire post - sources credited

Why would that be? And who is Smartech?

For one thing, Smartech hosts the gwb43 web server of the RNC, where members of the administration and the DoJ have been sending emails to avoid going through the White House servers, which are subject to public (and Democratic) scrutiny. You remember - the "lost" emails that the Judiciary Committee has subpoenaed.

On Election Night 2004, the Republican Party not only controlled the vote-counting process in Ohio, the final presidential swing state, through a secretary of state who was a co-chair of the Bush campaign, but it also controlled the technology that allowed the tally of the vote in Ohio's 88 counties to be reported to the media and voters.

There are plenty of allegations of and investigations into fraud in Ohio 2004, including Bush victories in three counties with 120, 124 and 131 percent voter turnouts, and one precinct having 638 presidential voters, but 4,258 votes for George W! Cannonfire quotes a source that says these results "were routed by county election officials through Ohio's Secretary of State's office."

And Smartech?

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

The Missing E-Mails

Rove to the Rescue!

The White House wants to see the emails before they're turned over to the investigating committee. (Assuming the good folks who "lost" them "find" them.)

There "exists a clear and indisputable Executive Branch interest" in the emails on the RNC-issued accounts, wrote Emmet Flood, Special Counsel to the President.

Conyers isn't buying it:

  TPM Muckraker article

I must say, I agree that there is "a clear and indisputable" Executive Branch interest in those emails. Namely Rove's and Bush's participation.

Purge Surge

Back 'round to Karl.

Rove's lawyer argues that all of his 2005-and-before emails on RNC servers were deleted by accident. Not deleted from Rove's computers. Deleted from the servers. Presumably, that means the ones in Tennessee. By accident. And Karl Rove's emails were the only ones deleted from those servers -- even though dozens of other people in the White House used those RNC accounts.

That sound very likely to you?

  Cannonfire post

Me either. I thought they were saying they were deleted from Karl's machine, which I could possibly understand. What I had read was that they were saying he deleted them for space conservation, assuming they were archived somewhere else. But erasing them from the servers? And only Karl's? Wellllll....

And a reminder....

Jack Abramoff's former personal assistant, Ralston became Karl Rove's assistant in 2001, where she was his "implant" at the White House.

[...]

But after a report last October by Waxman's committee (then chaired by Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA)) showed that Ralston had accepted thousands of dollars in gifts from Abramoff without compensating him, she abruptly resigned.

[...]

Ralston used such outside [email] accounts when corresponding with Abramoff, even writing to him once, “I now have an RNC blackberry which you can use to e-mail me at any time. No security issues like my WH email.”

  TPM Muckraker article

This whole thing stinks to high heaven.

Ralston was supposed to give a deposition April 5. I can't find anything about it except for an unreferenced note on a discussion board that it was postponed indefinitely.

Update :

According to someone who's had conversations with White House officials, the plan to fire all 93 U.S. attorneys originated with political adviser Karl Rove. It was seen as a way to get political cover for firing the small number of U.S. attorneys the White House actually wanted to get rid of. Documents show the plan was eventually dismissed as impractical.

  NPR article

No wonder he erased those emails.

Purge Surge

Looks to me like GovTech may have scrubbed all reference to the White House from its site. If so, they forgot to rewrite the NewMedia site.

I theorize that the rewrite occurred when Patrick Fitzgerald tried to acquire emails relevant to the Plame inquiry in 2004-2006.

CREW has just revealed that no less than FIVE MILLION emails may have been scrubbed. (See the full CREW report here.) What does Mike Connell, Bush loyalist, know about this?

  Cannonfire article

Joe at Cannonfire has been getting deeper into this email business than other places I've been checking. He's been looking at the companies handling the servers and their connections to Bush. I'm too lazy. I'll just wait to see how it pans out in the investigations (and keep an eye on Joe).

What earns my disgust with the whole thing is how the White House plays the game. Just as in the "document dump", I can see the five million emails becoming a weapon in their arsonal for guarding their secrets. They dumped 3,000 documents on the investigating committee in one fell swoop when records were requested. Much of the information on those documents was blacked out, and now the committee has to ask for the records again, but unredacted. And the White House plays the martyr. 'We gave you three thousand documents. We're doing more than our part in complying with the investigation.'

Just wait till they dump three million emails, heavily redacted. 'What more do you want? Those darn Democrats playing partisan politics are just so unreasonable.'

They're patsies in my book.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

You and What Army?

Congress thinks they're going to get the RNC/White House/Justice Department emails? Feh. I believe the WH has thumbed its nose at any law it chooses to ignore enough times that we can stop pretending they're ever going to do otherwise.

I think White House pressers Scott Stanzel can do a little better on telling us why the White House changed their email retention policy for RNC emails back in 2004.

[...]

[O]rders from Pat Fitzgerald were the reason for the change in White House policy in 2004. So the change in policy was tied to yet another criminal investigation of the White House. And the White House and the key employees in question -- namely Karl Rove and people working for him at the White House political office -- were specifically on notice not to destroy the emails they sent through the RNC servers. And yet they took affirmative steps to continuing destroying them, even after all of this had happened.

  TPM post

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Quick! Scrub the Servers!

While there's still time.

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

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

Mr. Leahy is not a happy camper.

"The purpose of our review is to make every reasonable effort to recover potentially lost e-mails, and that is why we've been in contact with forensic experts," he said.

Leahy scoffed.

"I've got a teenage kid in my neighborhood that can go get 'em for them," he told reporters later.

Not if you don't get him there yesterday.

And check it out...Chuck Schumer is giving Gonzo the questions he's going to ask him at his testimony! So that the Democrats can't be accused of trying to set perjury traps! WTF?? Sticks and stones, Dems. Sticks and stones.

You know, when I was at the University of Missouri, I knew a horticulture professor who told me that the football players were often enrolled in his classes, because they were considered easy courses, and the players had to pass their academic courses in order to stay on the team. Even at that, he said, he was not permitted to give them failing grades, and so was required to give them the questions to the tests before they took the exams.

How fortunate for Gonzo that he will have the opportunity to carefully prepare his lies and alibis (should he need to, of course) because the Dems would wimp out if the Republicans were to call them any more bad names.

Kee-rist.

...but hey...you know.

Aw, Gee

We're really sorry, 'cuz we're usually so capable, but, gosh, we lost those emails.

Purge

We may see Monica on the stand yet. Conyers (MI) and Sanchez (CA) responded to Goodling's attorney:

[T]he Fifth Amendment privilege, under long-standing Supreme Court precedents, does not provide a reason to fail to appear to testify; the privilege must be invoked by the witness on a question-by-question basis.

As we thought, Monica was jumping the gun a bit by taking the Fifth before she even took the stand.

Game on.

Gonzo Woes

Ooooh. Unfair.

The Senators have sent another demand.

The committee wants all the relevant documents, all the lists, all the rankings of U.S. attorneys, every scrap of paper.

[...]

In particular, the committee members asked for Gonzales' cheat sheets on the firings.

  TPM Muckraker article

They're asking for the little notes he's writing to himself while he's preparing for his testimony. That's just not right. It should make it all the harder for him, since he doesn't appear to be the kind of guy who can wing it. But I'm having a hard time working up any sympathy for Gonzo.

The Committee wasn't too happy with the document dump they received from their last request, either. Now they want...

...the full text of all documents that had been partially or completely blacked out in the Justice Department's initial release of more than 3,000 pages last month. [... and] an unredacted list ranking the performance and standing of each of the 93 U.S. attorneys.

By the way, Kyle Sampson's replacement as Chief of Staff for Gonzo is Kevin J. O'Connor No, not that Kevin J. O'Connor. This one.

gwb43

The side issue to the Attorney purge - or I should say a side issue - is the use of "unofficial" email services to avoid required scrutiny.

A White House spokesman defended the use of outside e-mail accounts as an appropriate method of separating official business from political campaign work.

But the use of those accounts by officials discussing the firings -- and one from now-imprisoned lobbyist Jack Abramoff -- have led a liberal watchdog group to accuse administration of trying to skirt the law governing preservation of presidential records.

  CNN article

And, speaking of Jack Abramoff, a commenter on Josh Marshall's blog reminds us that there was another instance of an attorney being removed, albeit in a different manner, who was directly connected to the Abramoff case, back in 2005.

[...] Bush "promoted" the head of the Public Integrity Section, Noel Hillman, to a federal judgeship in New Jersey. Hillman had been running the section’s investigation into the lobbying activities of Jack Abramoff. Three weeks prior to his nomination, Abramoff announced his guilty plea and agreed to testify against others, including members of Congress and White House staff.

Obviously, Hillman had to go.

Bush also removed another attorney who was investigating Abramoff back in 2003.

Carol Lam, one of the attorneys purged, was of course, prosecuting the Duke Cunningham case (as you know, Cunningham is the convicted, receiving half of the Abramoff bribery case), and it's speculated that she might have been after other powerful targets.

That Jack Abramoff bribery case just won't go away, will it? It's a deep, deep rabbit hole. (It may even circle round and connect to Insane McCain, but who knows where all those tunnels lead?)

Waxman's committee released another chain of e-mails it said illustrated the type of exchange taking place on the account. The e-mails began with a February 2003 message from Abramoff to Susan Ralston, the former executive assistant to President Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove.

[...]

When an associate notified him that his e-mail had been forwarded to another White House aide, Abramoff replied, "Dammit. It was sent to Susan on her RNC pager and was not supposed to go into the WH (White House) system."

[..]

Ralston resigned in October out of concern that her ties to Abramoff would be "a distraction," the White House said.

A distraction. Making it hard to focus on keeping Karl out of jail.

And speaking of those email services the GOP has been using for rabbit tunnels around the law, a blog called Neomeme has a list of other domains the Republicans have registered for various purposes. The names are kind of fun to run through, but the ones they've registered to avoid having them used by opponents are even better...

Yup, that’s right. georgewbushsucks.net, officially registered by the Republican National Committee.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

The 18-Day Gap

Cannonfire has some questions and answers.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.