Dan Froomkin reported yesterday that this as yet little-reported business about Karl Rove and his buddies using RNC e-mail to skirt document archiving requirements may be the next scandal of the Bush administration:
As John D. McKinnon writes in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required): "The widespread use of private email accounts by some top White House officials is sparking a congressional probe into the practice and whether it violates a post-Nixon law requiring that White House deliberations be documented.
"A top Democratic lawmaker says outside email accounts were used in an attempt to avoid scrutiny; the White House says their purpose was to avoid using government resources for political activities, although they were used to discuss the firing of U.S. attorneys."
Most of the e-mail accounts at issue are on Republican National Committee servers. For instance: "Susan Ralston, until recently presidential adviser Karl Rove's assistant at the White House, appears to have used at least four outside email accounts: a 'gwb' domain account, a 'georgewbush.com' account, and an 'rnchq.org' account -- all run by the RNC -- plus an AOL account. She once emailed two associates of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, 'I now have an RNC blackberry which you can use to e-mail me at any time. No security issues like my WH email.' . . .
"'At the end of the day, it looks like they were trying to avoid the records act . . . by operating official business off the official systems,' said John Podesta, who worked in the White House for the entire Clinton presidency, including a stint as chief of staff. . . .
"White House officials dispute the criticisms, saying the purpose of the RNC accounts has been to avoid running afoul of another federal law, the Hatch Act. It prohibits many federal officials from engaging in political activity on government time or with government resources."
Will these e-mails ever see the light of day? McKinnon writes: "The White House and RNC said the RNC is preserving the emails generated by White House officials on the RNC's computers, and that they are exempt from the RNC's normal policy of erasing emails after 30 days."
And yet, he notes: "When Congress adopted the Presidential Records Act, it didn't give any agency much authority to police the White House's handling of official records. . . . Congress also has had trouble obtaining many internal records from the political parties in the past."
Here's Bob Franken discussing the story on CNN yesterday: "It's about the Presidential Records Act, which requires the preservation of all official records of and about the president. . . .
"There are also messages to and from lobbyist Jack Abramoff, now in prison. At one point, according to investigators, after an e-mail was apparently sent by accident to the White House account of an assistant to Karl Rove, Abramoff fired another one saying, 'Damn it, it was not supposed to go in the White House system.' . . .
"Neither administration aides nor Republican Party officials would agree to be interviewed on camera after repeated requests from CNN. But a White House spokesman, Scott Stanzel, in a statement, called the use of different computers to have the separate e-mail account for political activities, 'appropriate, modeled after the historical practice of previous administrations.'"
The refusal of the White House press office to directly address specific questions about these e-mails leaves these issues unresolved:
1) Did the e-mails violate internal White House policy or the Presidential Records Act?
2) Were Rove and the others aware that official business should be conducted on official servers?
3) Were they intentionally trying to keep their e-mails off the official system and therefore permanently out of public view, or was it just a matter of convenience?
4) How does this White House distinguish official business from political business -- if at all?
Here's the rub, though: If this Administration was conducting its business on RNC computers in order to skirt disclosure requirements, it also loses the right to claim executive privilege.
But all this brings up another point I've wondered about: Is there, where an American president is concerned, a kind of "tipping point of evil" beyond which Americans become so appalled that they simply stop believing that their leader -- no matter how much trust he's lost, simply could not be capable of being as bad as their own eyes and ears show him being? When Bill Clinton was being hounded about 25-year-old land deals, and claims of women about affairs and sexual harassment, these were "bad deeds" that people could at least wrap their minds around, because they are things most Americans could at least see themselves as having the potential to do. They are the sort of normal human foibles that televangelists want to be forgiven by their public for all the time.
But when you start talking about playing on fear and ginning up intelligence to go to war so the Vice President and other cronies can stuff their pockets with taxpayer cash; when you start talking about using the Justice Department to keep people from voting; when you start talking about rigged voting machines; when you start talking about Administration officials taking their work offline from government computers so as not to leave a paper trail -- then you start getting into a level of criminality that calls the entire American system of government into question.
Americans have a firm belief in the rightness of our system of government. For all that half of Americans don't vote, you don't see them advocating for a monarchy, or a dictatorship, or even a parliamentary system. They may not completely understand how it works, but they do recognize it as something unique. Messy, perhaps, but something that for the most part works and that has, yes, checks and balances to make sure things don't get out of hand. But this bunch has turned that notion entirely on its head, digging for the loopholes and the things in our system that weren't built to be entirely bulletproof to essentially operate outside the law.
We really started seeing this with Iran-Contra; this kind of "shadow government" operating outside the normal purview of what's laid out in the Constitution. But the Bush Administration has elevated it to an art form. I would hope that if we ever succeed in getting these guys to leave (and given how they're rigging the system, given their belief in a unitary executive, and given their assembling of their own Praetorian Guard in the form of Blackwater merecenaries, I wonder), we can start addressing and closing some of these loopholes that have allowed an Administration to be so corrupt that most Americans just can't fathom that Our Great Country could succumb to such people.
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