http://www.pensitoreview.com/2007/04/09/waxman-going-after-roves-rogue-email-system/Waxman Going after Rove’s Rogue Email System
Posted by Jon Ponder | Apr. 9, 2007, 8:40 am
As soon as the Bushies installed themselves in the White House in 2001, the Republican Party set up a second tier of electronic communications out of the political office run by Karl Rove.
While the White House may find it more difficult to claim executive privilege in preventing Congress from reviewing emails on the RNC system, Republicans aren’t too worried: the RNC purges emails from its servers after 30 days.
On its surface, the new email domains were legal. In fact, their stated purpose was to avoid the criticism that they were doing GOP politics on the public dime — a charge Republicans had made against the Clinton White House without ever offering proof of it, of course.
Conservatives view laws as only applying to “the little people,” meaning Democrats. So Rove and his network of operatives in the federal bureaucracy began using the alternative emails to subvert the Presidential Records Act, a government sunshine law that requires all communication involving a member of the president’s staff to be preserved for scrutiny.
Amid the thousands of documents dumped by the Dept. of Justice related to the U.S. Attorney purge, congressional investigators found emails to and from Rove’s White House and DOJ political flunkies using the alternative email domains (including gwb43.com and rnchhq.com), apparently in an effort to circumvent the oversight and the sunshine law.
Rep. Henry Waxman, who chairs the House committee that investigates government operations, is demanding to see the GOP’s official emails sent to and from the White House related several investigatiosn - the prosecutor purge, the corrupt GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Rove’s use of the Government Services Administration (GSA) for political purposes:
White House staff arranging for the GSA briefing by a Rove deputy, Scott Jennings, used the gwb43.com e-mail domain name. That caught the attention of Waxman’s investigators, who had previously examined e-mails from Abramoff to Rove’s executive assistant, Susan B. Ralston, to object to an impending Interior Department decision. The decision, he wrote, was “anathema to all our supporters it’s important if possible to get some quiet message from the WH
that this is absurd.”
more...
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
