FIVE MILLION e-mails were lost by the White House according to a just released report from CREW called "WITHOUT A TRACE: The Missing White House Emails and the Violations of the Presidential Records Act." FIVE MILLION...that's insane.
As I explained in the post below, Bush staffers have been already been using separate RNC e-mail accounts to conduct official business in order to avoid the law and hide evidence. How? Because White House officials are supposed to use White House email accounts and White House Blackberrys to conduct official business (this is required under federal law and under the White House's own explicit rules). That's because under federal law every single electronic communication of a White House official must be recorded and kept in the federal archives. That makes such communications subpoenable if and when those employees break the law. By using the RNC email system and the RNC Blackberrys the White House thought they were hiding their potential crimes, and in so doing were violating federal law. We learned only yesterday that the White House admitted that their employees destroyed countless emails. Now we know that by countless they meant 5 fricking million.
While nothing should shock us about the Bush administration anymore, this is shocking.
No wonder the Bush people can't run the country and can't come up with a plan for the war. They can't even figure out their own e-mail system (of course, they knew darn well what they were doing, they were destroying the evidence). They even knew it was a problem, but didn't bother to fix it. You know that a lot of those missing e-mails are things they don't want us to ever see. What a coincidence that they started losing those e-mails in March of 2003, right when the Iraq war was starting.
FIVE MILLION. He is truly the worst, and now most corrupt, president ever. He's even worse than any of us could have dreamed up.
Nixon had nothing on these guys. They've deleted countless emails to and from senior White House staff in order to hide the evidence of any wrongdoing, and in clear violation of federal law. But as we learned during another great Republican scandal, Iran-Contra, emails aren't always really deleted after you hit the delete button. The Hill needs to subpoena the Republican National Committee computer systems, now (it was the RNC that provided the senior White House staff with the emails and blackberrys they used to skirt the law). And then the Congress ought to hit any outside email services used by senior White House staff, in clear violation of White House police and federal law, with more subpoenas. Again, delete does not always mean delete.
Countless e-mails to and from many key White House staffers have been deleted -- lost to history and placed out of reach of congressional subpoenas -- due to a brazen violation of internal White House policy that was allowed to continue for more than six years, the White House acknowledged yesterday.
The leading culprit appears to be President Bush's enormously influential political adviser Karl Rove, who reportedly used his Republican National Committee-provided Blackberry and e-mail accounts for most of his electronic communication.
Then to add insult to injury, the White House lied today about the entire scandal:
Said [White House spokesman Scott] Stanzel: "I guess the bottom line is that our policy at the White House was not clear enough for employees."
But when I asked Stanzel to read out loud the White House e-mail policy, it seemed clear enough to me: "Federal law requires the preservation of electronic communications sent or received by White House staff," says the handbook that all staffers are given and expected to read and comply with.
"As a result, personnel working on behalf of the EOP [Executive Office of the President] are expected to only use government-provided e-mail services for all official communication."
The handbook further explains: "The official EOP e-mail system is designed to automatically comply with records management requirements."
And if that wasn't clear enough, the handbook notes -- as was the case in the Clinton administration -- that "commercial or free e-mail sites and chat rooms are blocked from the EOP network to help staff members ensure compliance and to prevent the circumvention of the records management requirements."
Conspiracy. Nice. Basically, in order to get around those quaint things in federal law like the federal records act that requires White House written communications to be archived, and other pesky things like congressional subpoenas, Bush decided to have his top employees use non-White-House email addresses and Blackberrys, both issued by the Republican National Committee, so that their particularly embarrassing work, like the firing of the US Attorneys, would never appear in the official record - i.e., there'd be no evidence. Only thing is, they got caught.
And surprise surprise, some emails were mysteriously deleted.
Check this out. She didn't even try to hide it. From ABC News:
The Office of Special Counsel confirmed to ABC News it has launched an investigation into General Services Administration chief Lurita Doan, probing concerns she may have violated a ban against conducting partisan political activity at government expense by participating in a meeting featuring a presentation by a White House political aide on GOP election strategy.
Doan's agency spends over $56 billion a year on paper clips, office space, car fleets and other necessities for federal agencies.
In January, Doan attended a meeting at which senior White House political aide W. Scott Jennings briefed Doan, a White House appointee, and other officials at a GSA facility on Republican plans to win seats in Congress.
After the presentation, according to some witnesses contacted by congressional investigators, Doan encouraged other attendees to find ways GSA could help "our candidates" in the 2008 election. Doan has told Congress she doesn't recall making the statement, and other witnesses interviewed by congressional investigators are said to have backed her up....
But Doan may not have been the only top official to host a White House political official at her agency. The White House political office has been giving presentations similar to the one at GSA since at least 2002, briefing officials throughout the government on Republican campaign information, according to a recent book by two Los Angeles Times reporters.
"[White House political adviser Karl] Rove and [former Bush campaign chief and one-time Republican National Committee head Ken] Mehlman ventured to nearly every cabinet agency to share key polling data" leading up to the 2002 midterm elections, wrote Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten in their book, "One Party Country," "and to deliver a reminder of White House priorities, including the need for the president's allies to win in the next election."
While previous administrations had sent officials to cabinet agencies, the duo wrote, "Such intense regular communication from the political office had never occurred before."
The White House spokesmen acknowledged today what Senator Barbara Boxer said months ago, and got savaged by the White House for saying - namely, that having kids fighting over in Iraq changes the way a parent thinks about the war.
But both Perino and Bartlett acknowledged that part of Dowd's change in views has to be attributed to having a son getting ready to risk his life in a very difficult war. Bartlett said, "That can only impact a parent's mind when they work threw these issues." Perino said, "I can only imagine how this affects a parent's thinking."
"Who pays the price [for Bush's incompetence in Iraq]? I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young," Boxer said. "You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families."
And look at what the White House spokesman had to say about all of this just three months ago:
White House spokesman Tony Snow on Friday called Boxer's comments "outrageous."
"I don't know if she was intentionally that tacky, but I do think it's outrageous. Here you got a professional woman, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Barbara Boxer is sort of throwing little jabs because Condi doesn't have children, as if that means that she doesn't understand the concerns of parents. Great leap backward for feminism," Snow told FOX News Talk's Brian and The Judge.
The Republican war on science continues. From ABC News:
Bush administration officials throughout the government have engaged in White House-directed efforts to stifle, delay or dampen the release of climate change research that casts the White House or its policies in a bad light, says a new report that purports to be the most comprehensive assessment to date of the subject.
This is a very disturbing story from ThinkProgress. Read it through carefully. $140,000 changes hands between the White House (Dick Cheney's office, to be specific) and an outside contractor who then immediately turns around and pays the same amount of money, exactly, to buy a boat for Randy Duke Cunningham. And who put Randy Duke and the outside contracter in jail? US Attorney Carol Lam. Was she onto Cheney and the White House when they fired her?
The problem is that Snow said this ten years ago, about Bill Clinton. The Chicago Trib's blog has Snow's entire article he wrote about Clinto, here are some excerpts:
"The wall of separation between Mr. Clinton and his deeds remains strong because minions have stuck to their alibis. But now comes an episode in which the Man from Hope stands alone. It is his recent attempt to claim executive privilege for counselors Bruce Lindsey and Sidney Blumenthal and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.
"Mr. Clinton can't blame his lawyers for this latest feint. He alone can assert the privilege. The maneuver places him at the heart of his administration's ongoing effort to use executive privilege as a way of concealing the truth about whether the president exposed himself....
"Earlier in this administration, then-White House legal counsel Lloyd Cutler decreed that the White House never would assert privilege in the face of a criminal investigation. He merely was reiterating long-standing executive-branch policy along those lines. President Ronald Reagan didn't invoke privilege in Iran-contra, and neither did President George Bush.
"But precedent is gone, and Mr. Clinton wants to protect conversations about a chubby intern from Hollywood. In so doing, he becomes the first president since Richard Nixon to use executive privilege in a criminal inquiry.
"Evidently, Mr. Clinton wants to shield virtually any communications that take place within the White House compound on the theory that all such talk contributes in some way, shape or form to the continuing success and harmony of an administration. Taken to its logical extreme, that position would make it impossible for citizens to hold a chief executive accountable for anything. He would have a constitutional right to cover up.
"Chances are that the courts will hurl such a claim out, but it will take time.
"One gets the impression that Team Clinton values its survival more than most people want justice and thus will delay without qualm. But as the clock ticks, the public's faith in Mr. Clinton will ebb away for a simple reason: Most of us want no part of a president who is cynical enough to use the majesty of his office to evade the one thing he is sworn to uphold the rule of law.''
UPDATE: Religious right preacher says White House is lying when it denies appointing him as a special envoy. He's also now naming names.
The Bush White House reportedly appointed arch-homophobe Ken Hutcherson as a "special envoy" of the White House Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives. You'll remember him as the man who got Microsoft to dump its supports for gay civil rights (Microsoft subsequently dumped Hutcherson and came back to the fold). Hutcherson himself is claiming the White House appointed him. The White House is reportedly denying it (though their denial sounds awfully legalistic to me).
Hutcherson then claims he used his new White House anointed status to meet with Latvian government officials and go bother our US embassy officials in Latvia. And who reportedly tagged along with Mr. Hutcherson on his White House endorsed trip? None of than religious right anti-gay activist Scott Lively, a man accused of publishing Holocaust Revisionism by HateWatch. You see, Lively is the guy behind the theory that gays were the really masterminds behind the Holocaust.
Hutcherson also says he was there pushing Latvia to oppose gay marriage. Good God, do these people ever quit? Hutcherson also lectured the US Embassy officials about their supposed support for the homosexual agenda - I'm sure they had nothing better to do than meet with this goofball now officially representing the Bush the White House.
Last week, ex-NFL player Pastor Ken Hutcherson flew in from Washington to give advice on fighting LGBT rights.
He was joined by another American, Scott Lively, co-author of 'The Pink Swastika- Homosexuality in the Nazi Party'. This disturbing book is an insane diatribe claiming that ‘homosexualism’ not only gave birth to Nazi imperialism but also led to the Holocaust itself. It's crackpot theories stem from rumour, conjecture and fantasy and despite the fact that few take it seriously, it's a best-seller in anti-gay circles.
The scary tome, which happens to be on its 4th edition, claims that: “homosexuality is primarily a predatory addiction striving to take the weak and unsuspecting down with it”.
And just to bring the conspiracy full circle, who do you think helped promote Lively's theories in the past? None other than religious right homophobe Peter LaBarbera, who has worked at the Family Research Council and was yet another man at the Concerned Women for America. LaBarbera published Lively's crackpot theories in his anti-gay rag, the Lambda Report.
These are the hateful, bigoted people who make up the religious right. These are the wackjobs the Republican party and the Bush White House continue to embrace.
