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.