Lawyer: Karl Rove Assumed “Lost” Emails Were Stored
Perhaps if White House political maven Karl Rove leaves the Bush administration, he can star in a legal spin-off of the show “The Biggest Loser” — because as his lawyer tells it, he never dreamed his emails that would eventually be wanted by a Senate investigating committee would vanish:
Karl Rove’s lawyer on Friday dismissed the notion that President Bush’s chief political adviser intentionally deleted his own e-mails from a Republican-sponsored server, saying Rove believed the communications were being preserved in accordance with the law.
In other words: he isn’t to blame. So who is? Who was in charge of the program both at the RNC and in the administration? And will there be accountability (an investigation or at the least removal for poor management)? MORE:
The issue arose because the White House and Republican National Committee have said they may have lost e-mails from Rove and other administration officials. Democratically chaired congressional committees want those e-mails for their probe of the firings of eight federal prosecutors.“His understanding starting very, very early in the administration was that those e-mails were being archived,” Rove’s attorney, Robert Luskin, said.
The prosecutor probing the Valerie Plame spy case saw and copied all of Rove’s e-mails from his various accounts after searching Rove’s laptop, his home computer, and the handheld computer devices he used for both the White House and Republican National Committee, Luskin said.
The prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, subpoenaed the e-mails from the White House, the RNC and Bush’s re-election campaign, he added.
“There’s never been any suggestion that Fitzgerald had anything less than a complete record,” Luskin said.
Any e-mails Rove deleted were the type of routine deletions people make to keep their inboxes orderly, Luskin said. He said Rove had no idea the e-mails were being deleted from the server, a central computer that managed the e-mail.
On Thursday, one Democratic committee chairman said his understanding was that the RNC believed Rove might have been deleting his e-mails and in 2005 took action to preserve them in accordance with the law and pending legal action.
The mystery of the missing e-mails is just one part of a furor over the firings of eight federal prosecutors that has threatened Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ job and thrown his Justice Department into turmoil.
And so the furor continues. So it’s just a coincidence that the emails needed in this probe were lost? It seems a lot of potentially troublesome documents involving George Bush and the Bush administration were lost over the years.
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23 Responses to “Lawyer: Karl Rove Assumed “Lost” Emails Were Stored”
There seem to be more and more people, people we would think of as Bush Backers, shaking their heads in wonder. Here’s what Lee Iacocca take on the direction the current administration is taking us:
Lee Iacocca on the White House: Throw the bums out!�
from Crooks & Liars
Query to the Constitutional law scholars…(although I realize the law isn’t as much fun as hypothesizing)……….
Unless Congress can show, beyond essentially speculation, that a law was broken with regard to the firings of appointees, does it have authority to demand Executive Branch documents?
YES. But it would seem that some would rather split hairs than take a hard look at the activities of this administration and the potential consequence’s of Bushs power grab.
How can casualobserver think that is a serious question? It’s like saying that that a cop would have to have enough evidence to convict a suspect before they could get a warrant to search for evidence. The real world doesn’t work that way and in spite of what his supporters might wish, Bush isn’t supposed to be above the law.
I think the Bush administration is really on the cutting edge of innovation in duplicity and bullsh*t artistry. I really had no idea how far you can go with simply not testifying and/or giving whatever response was most convenient for you despite its utter implausibility. Every time I think they’ve managed to move the bar to a new and unconquerable height, they surprise me again.
I mean really, they have been blowing off Congress for years by just not admitting to anything. Can it be that easy?
Oh and casual, yes Congress can do that. Otherwise, they have no power over the Executive branch, no ability to stop a president that is doing things that run contrary to the way our goverment works.
If in fact these e-mails are irretrievable (Both White House and RNC.) then either the network admin was paid off or should have been paid better so they could hire someone competent.
Karl ‘scrubbed’ ;em quite a while back… back when he wasn’t involved in the Valerie Plame Fiasco… maybe Fitzpatrick will help straighten it out.
It probably one of the only times, but I agree completely with Lee Iacocca. I understand partisan loyalty to a point, but even loyal Republicans should be outraged by this sleazy BS. How can you care about your party more than your country? Bush was elected by the people- he’s not a dictator.
Rove and the DOJ obviously have had no intention of cooperating with the Congressional inquiry. They have their loyal AM radio hosts and Friends of the Administration at FNC who keep the talking points circulating- and ordinarily smart people repeat them back word for word. Its as though the Bushies were part of a cult, whose leader keeps feeding them all kinds of crap to pacify them. And it works.
When you’re investigating a matter, you can and do look at patterns of behavior; that’s where ‘probably cause’ comes into play.
If the pattern of behavior regarding a matter of document discovery is that pertinent documents are consistently ‘lost’ or ‘erased,’ then it’s very hard to honestly conclude that each individual instance of a particular document being lost or a particular email being erased are inadvertent.
This is particularly true when the law requires certain document and email retention as a matter of standard, routine practice. It’s difficult to accept the idea that the highest offices in the land – among them, the highest law enforcement office – don’t know what those laws are.
Consistently ‘losing’ and ‘erasing’ documents and emails that are pertinent to investigations, and consistently claiming ignorance of mandated retention laws, become a pattern of behavior. It becomes a probable cause that laws are being broken deliberately, that documents are being lost and erased deliberately.
At which point, the investigators are correct to assume there’s something more to investigate.
My keyboard is on the fritz, and my italic-close tag didn’t work. Many apologies, and someone please turn off the italics.
Casey how can the Congressional committee investigate if all of the pertinent evidence has been purposely deleted? They seem to be masters of this type of thing -just not at good governance.
I think that worked.
kritter, that’s one for techies to answer, and I’m not a techie.
My impression, based on all that I’ve read about the email deletions, is that forensic investigators might be able to ressurect some of the emails. Or that some might still be found on recipients’ servers – or on servers that relayed the emails. The trouble with any of these ideas is that they would have required the Congressional investigators to move fast before more destruction was done – and they haven’t; SFAIK, they haven’t even actually served all of the subpoenas.
Unless there’s an untouched cache somewhere… or the document dumps include replies that contain the original messages, or printouts someone inadvertently didn’t destroy.
Maybe one of the committees will strike an immunity deal with Goodling. Maybe we’ll know more next week, when some deadlines run out and Gonzales is supposed to testify (unless that’s been rescheduled).
The best bet is to pursue the path they’re already on. Trying to get copies of received email on other agency computers.
They _can_ to a degree remove the disk and see what it may be able to retrieve via forensic type actions. However if any of said servers applied DOD specified _wiping_ than that would render what they got to be worse than trying to find a needle in a haystack.
Remember there are millions of emails passing through those servers. And your looking for what probably amounts to a key handful.
Technically speaking, Rove could be quite correct. Not many techs have the big guy come to them to ensure that email duplication is properly archived. They _do_ yes – however that is normally when they’re either interested in keeping an eye on someone; they want to see if an employee had malicious intent; or just read some article somewhere.
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-email14apr14,0,5314203.story?page=1&coll=la-home-headlines
Sam’s got it right. OJ’s Dream Team has nothing on these guys.
I blame the Patriot Act for about half of it – proof of the Congress’ eunuch status and abandonment of their Constitutional duties – and every single senator owes Feingold an apology for voting for that crock.
As much as I hate Rove and Co., e-mail preservation must be part of a program transparently administered by the IT departments. Of course the White House and RNC are responsible for creating the appropriate programs and administering them according to law. Leaving this responsibility to all individual users is unrealistic and unmanageable. Do you have comprehensive archives of your e-mail?
If there is a cover-up or failure, it is not with Rove’s e-mail accounts, it is must be deeper and more involved.
But it is very suspicious that every time pertinent records are requested by an oversight committee from the WH, they have conveniently disappeared or inadvertently been deleted. If you look at the overall pattern over 6 years it really looks incriminating. Records disappeared during Katrina, CIA Leak Case, DOJ scandal, and Abu Ghraib among other matters. How could this be anything else but purposeful?
The RNC is not covered by the same laws as the WH servers. This is why Rove and so many others working in the White House were using those accounts, in an attempt to hide things they didn’t want the public to know. As much as some people might hate the idea of a new law I think it will be necessary to ban this kind of duplicitousness from now on. Are you working for the United States government and its people or the RNC/DNC? If it is the former doing any business through any communications system other than the official ones governed by transparency laws must become a crime.
I am a techie for a small business and I can tell you that while we don’t run our own e-mail servers the really important business that is done by e-mail by the president of our company is archived once a year and the archives backed up on CD. Anything the CFO considers important is copied to the president of the company so it will be backed up. Our regular backups are relatively simple in that we run a full backup every weekend and differential ones every weekday. The weekly full backups are kept for three months. Then at the end of the year another full backup is done that is archived. We are revamping our system so that all important files on client machines will soon be captured as part of the overall network backup as well as individual backups. I’m also currently researching the most cost effective method for us to make this system more extensive and reliable. And this is just for a very small privately held company. It’s not nearly as extensive as I’d have to make it if we went public.
BTW, what should have happened is that as soon as this fraud on the public was discovered every e-mail server involved should have been taken down and substitutes or backups put in place while the current servers and every backup system they have was examined while no new files were being written to storage. Every bit of continuing usage makes recovery of old data that much more unlikely though after the amount of time that has passed recovery would be a bear as it is.