White House Email Loss Being Likened To Watergate Tape Gap
April 13th, 2007 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
If imagery is vital in politics, the Bush administration has now entered into truly perilous political territory.
News that a slew of emails requested by Senators for a probe of the controversial firing of U.S. attorneys is apparently lost is being increasingly compared by not just some progressive commentators but by at least one livid U.S. Senator of being reminiscent of the bad ‘old days of the Nixon administration’s Watergate crisis with the infamous 18-minute tape gap.
Only this time White House Secretary Rose Mary Woods’ nimble arms and feet as the cause is replaced by a big, fat, official “OOPS!” in the case of emails that just happen to be coincidentally believed to be linked to White House political maven Karl Rove.
And there’s worse news for the White House if a contention by a prominent blogging former litigator is picked up by the mainstream media: it seems that over the years documents that some believed might have been unflattering to George Bush and his administration have had a way of disappearing — in what the blogger calls “a pattern.”
Just read some of the New York Times’ latest article in what what historians may one day call The Scandal-Of-The-Day Presidency:
The White House said Thursday that missing e-mail messages sent on Republican Party accounts may include some relating to the firing of eight United States attorneys.The disclosure became a fresh political problem for the White House, as Democrats stepped up their inquiry into whether Karl Rove and other top aides to President Bush used the e-mail accounts maintained by the Republican National Committee to circumvent record-keeping requirements.
It also exposed the dual electronic lives led by Mr. Rove and 21 other White House officials who maintain separate e-mail accounts for government business and work on political campaigns — and raised serious questions, in the eyes of Democrats, about whether political accounts were used to conduct official work without leaving a paper trail.The clash also seemed to push the White House and Democrats closer to a serious confrontation over executive privilege, with the White House counsel, Fred F. Fielding, asserting that the administration has control over countless other e-mail messages that the Republican National Committee has archived. Democrats are insisting that they are entitled to get the e-mail messages directly from the national committee.
Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who is chairman of a House committee looking into the use of political e-mail accounts, wrote a letter to the attorney general on Thursday saying he had “particular concerns about Karl Rove� after a briefing his aides received from Rob Kelner, a lawyer for the Republican National Committee.
Mr. Rove uses several e-mail accounts, including one with the Republican National Committee, one with the White House and a private domain account that is registered to the political consulting company he once owned. Mr. Waxman said Mr. Kelner reported that in 2005, the national committee adopted a new policy, specifically aimed at Mr. Rove, which “removed Mr. Rove’s ability to personally delete his e-mails from the R.N.C. server.�
But one U.S. Senator made it clear he’s not buying White House explanations:
“Now we are learning that the ‘off book’ communications they were having about these actions, by using Republican political email addresses, have not been preserved,” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said on the Senate floor.He added, “Like the famous 18-minute gap in the Nixon White House tapes, it appears likely that key documentation has been erased or misplaced. This sounds like the Administration’s version of ‘the dog ate my homework.’”
….The Associated Press also noted that when actually delivered, Senator Leahy raised further doubts about the Republican Party’s explanation for the lost e-mails.
“They say they have not been preserved. I don’t believe that!” he proclaimed. “You can’t erase e-mails, not today. They’ve gone through too many servers.”
Leahy threatened further action in response to the news. “Those e-mails are there, they just don’t want to produce them. We’ll subpoena them if necessary.”
But the most troubling development for the White House could come from THIS COLUMN by Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald. Read it in full. Greenwald makes the case that there is a clear pattern in the way documents have somehow vanished if they were involved in controversies involving George Bush or his administration. Read it in full.
This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 12:39 am and is filed under Senate, Alberto Gonzales, U.S. Attorneys, Republicans, Karl Rove, Politics, Congress, George W. Bush, Law & Legal Matters. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
April 13th, 2007 at 8:15 am
Amen.
April 13th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
Ditto.
April 14th, 2007 at 4:09 am
The deleted e-mails need a name: Rosemary’s Babies comes to mind!
April 14th, 2007 at 11:56 am
This time, it is not follow the money; it’s follow the missing e-mails.
Karl Rove, senior advisor to George W. Bush and chief political operative, has set about bending our system of law-and-order to his sinister political cause. Eight US Attorneys fired to provide cover for Rove to replace the Arkansas US Attorney with one of his henchmen.
This is in preparation for smearing Hillary Clinton if she were to get her party’s nomination; Rove will have his Arkansas plant singing the second chorus of “Like a bridge over troubled Whitewater.�