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Crap and Corruption: White House Division
Reverberations from the U.S. attorney scandal – the one that Republicans said was much ado about nothing – continue to grow.
The latest and greatest is that countless e-mails to and from many key White House staffers have been deleted due to a brazen violation of internal White House policy that was allowed to continue for more than six years.
The leading culprit is . . . surprise of surprises, Karl Rove, who reportedly used his Republican National Committee-provided Blackberry and e-mail accounts for most of his electronic communication.
Rove, of course, serves at the pleasure of the president, but not the citizenry. That duly noted, it’s time to dump the clown.
More here.
17 Responses to “Crap and Corruption: White House Division”
What’s the use in firing him. He’ll just be replaced by someone nearly as soulless and criminal.
We should stop kidding ourselves by going after all these low-hanging fruit. This government is rotting from the head down.
Impeach the President and the Vice President and let’s end this national nightmare and world crisis.
I wonder what happened to the backup tapes and drives. Most IT departments save backup tapes and such for a couple of years. The ghost of Rosemary Woods is haughting the Whitehouse.
ABC News, among others, are saying that the emails may be gone but they’re not forgotten. A link.
Shaun – If the emails were anything like AOL or Outlook, the email files are stored locally on a PC. The FBI could kick down Rove’s door and search his harddrive for PST or ABI type files. Even a delete wouldn’t remove all traces, the emails could still be there or on someones laptop.
Rudi:
Correcto mundo.
As soon as I read that the committee was interested in those emails, I knew they would just coincidentally disappear, just as the memories of those who testify before it do. It would drive me crazy to be on one of those committees, because the truth always gets covered up. That’s probably why they got rid of Harriet Miers and hired Fred Fielding instead.
If Rove has the foresight to delete his emails from WH servers, then he certainly should have the foresight to use a disk wipe utility to make sure those files disappear from any home computer as well.
Maybe they are all in the closet where Hillary misplaced all her files for a few years.
Oh, wait, that’s right. No fair pointing out double standards. Silly me.
AR,
You think you’re so clever, but I doubt anyone here thinks that it’s okay for Democrats to obstruct investigations.
AustinRoth, “Oh, wait, that’s right. No fair pointing out double standards. Silly me.”
You know, you had a good joke going there for a minute and I even agreed with you. Then it was ruined with the old “picked on conservatives” line.
Instead of being outraged at the continued corruption in our Government -from both parties- and demanding it be cleaned up, some are more interested in pointing fingers as deflection to hide their own issues. We as citizens should demand better than that instead of joining the finger pointing crowds. I know, we’ve all done it, but two wrongs don’t make a right and just perpetuates the problem.
As Chis said, perhaps not in a non-partisan way, “This government is rotting from the head down.” This is still a valid argument and neither party is innocent here as they both have dirty hands.
Chris – Oh really? I don’t remember too many people here being overly upset with Sandy Berger.
Rambi – My attempt at a preemptive comeback. Someone was going to say something against it, after all.
I don’t think it is OK to obstruct, but my point was not that anyway. I am just tired that everything is treated as if stuff like this has never happened before, Bush the first/worse to do that, etc.
Say it is bad, say it is wrong, because it is, but keep it in perspective. Because, at the end of the day, Bush COULD NOT have done ANYTHING wrong in the firings.
Quite simply, they serve at the convenience of the President, and he needs no reason what-so-ever to fire them and replace them, and even if he did it for craven political purposes, he can.
I guess the about the only reason he couldn’t legally would be because of race, age, etc. discrimination.
On retrieveability.
This quote from the Frromkin post stood out:
Is this yet another case of White House and the RNC being too clever by half? Just delete any incriminating evidence, right?
And while I know there are ways to fix this, one wonders whether everyone using RNC email servers was sophisticated enough to realize that the delete key doesn’t actually erase all traces.
Judging from my coworkers, all bright sophisticated people in their own spheres, none the less a good many of them use email without any real concept of how it works.
I’d not be surprised it this proved to be the case here.
Bush may not be the first to do this stuff, but his Administration has definitely been the most brazen. And don’t you think that’s dangerous? This guy thinks he has such a hold on power that he does just about every underhanded thing you can think of…
AustinRoth, logic says that some is just partisan bickering that has been going on probably since about Babylonian times.
However, I think the majority of the moderates (or at least just me) are sick of the corruption in this administration because they ran on a campaign platform of PURGING corruption not bringing it to new heights.
As I said, finger pointing just perpetuates the problem. Yes, Clinton lied and it was wrong. Regan had, among others, the Iran-Contra issue. Again it was wrong. But none of these PAST wrongs make it RIGHT for this Administration and does NOTHING to fix the underlying issues.
> Maybe they are all in the closet
> where Hillary misplaced all her
> files for a few years.
Yep. After the 2008 election, printouts of all the e-mails should suddenly appear on a table one day in the White House family quarters.
Clinton had his problems. But if Bush could leave office after being impeached with a 70% approval rating, he’d be counting his blessings, lol! It does seem very useless to deal with every new outrage with but Hillary- but Bill- but Sandy Berger- but Socks! If the country was being run into the ground during the Clinton years it would have been more important to worry about Filegate or whether Clinton was using taxpayer funds to cover the expenses of Socks’ fan club. But we had a reasonably peaceful, prosperous 8 years.
This is now, when we have two wars that are going badly, a military that is being badly strained by aforesaid two wars, war profiteering out the wazoo, new scandals from the WH every week, and no one is accountable for anything. As far as I know Clinton didn’t put the presidential medal of freedom on Mike Espy or have Janet Reno order the USA’s to only prosecute Republican corruption cases. He seemed to get that he was there to serve the will of the people, and not the other way around as well.
Hillary Clinton’s law records?
You’re seriously equating that with all the corruption, lies, and malfeasance coming out of the Bush White House?
Let’s be clear on what’s going on with the USA scandal, OK?
USAs serve “at the pleasure of the President,” but that does not include using the hire-fire privilege to commit criminal acts. Obstructing investigations is a criminal act. Committing vote fraud while ostensibly prosecuting vote fraud is a criminal act.
The email disappearance is another criminal act. It’s, first, a violation of federal law regarding record retention. It’s, second, a violation of federal law concerning the use of private, non-secure communications to send sensitive governmental correspondence. It’s, third, a violation of the Hatch Act. And it’s, fourth, another criminal obstruction of justice – not only of the USA investigation, but of the NSA wiretap investigation and the Plame disclosure investigation.
All those investigations are into real, substantive violations of law by the Bush Administration – violations of law that protect our civil liberties, our national security, and the integrity of the federal legal system.
Whitewater was a land deal that not only broke no laws, but had no relevance or impact on the nation’s security, our civil liberties, or the functioning of the legal system.
There are no double standards here. There is a real difference between a non-scandal and an unending list of violations of federal law which truly endanger the country.