So, Henry Waxman (D-CA) now says that he believes Karl Rove deliberately deleted e-mails by US government officials about the political dismissal of US attorneys (which Gonzalez plainly lied about). Patrick Leahy said on the floor of the Senate today that he doesn't believe the White House when it says the e-mails are "lost." "Just like the 18 minutes of missing tape from Nixon" he said.
Them's fightin' words.
But it's not just talk. If Bush orchestrated email deletions to obstruct a Congressional investigation, that is the sort of thing you can be impeached over in this country (apparently violating the US Constitution doesn't count).
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Karl the Deleter
Posted by The Law Talking Guy at 9:52 PM
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
Not only were they obstructing a Congressional investigation but that investigation was designed to find out if the White House was abusing their power. Remember the alleged REASON for the firings...the fired US Attorneys were not willing to file politically motivated criminal charges against Democrats and/or had pursued charges (which resulted in convinctions) against Republicans. Rmember that these are all Republican appointees so it's unlikely that they were liberal activists themselves.
It wouldn't be the first time evidence was destroyed or covered up. Let's see, there are secret energy meetings with Cheney, rumors that damning ENRON files were in the imfamous building 7 that was demolished on 9/11, the re-classification of Regan and Bush 1 papers, etc.
Like Watergate, it is just a matter of time.
I am not passing judgment yet. As I understand it, staffers were given separate laptops and e-mail accounts by the RNC for discussing campaign-related matters to avoid the (illegal) use of government equipment for that purpose. On the other hand, these staffers were required to keep on record all government business... so basically they need to be very careful about which system they use and there is very little leeway for accidentally using the wrong one.
I have trouble managing three e-mail addresses, and I sometimes use a work-related e-mail for a personal matter, etc. They might have just screwed up and used the RNC system... which, as one would expect, is a system that the RNC wants to keep private and to purge regularly. So it may well have been an innocent mistake.
But if I know anything about politicians--especially sneaky RNC operatives--I'll bet you anything somebody kept a record of all e-mail correspondence *somewhere* even if they were not supposed to. I am eager to see what they said.
The problem is that they were using the RNC laptops to discuss the firings of the US Attornies. So if they used the RNC emails so as to avoid doing partisan business on their government computers, they are implicitly admitting that the firings were politically motivated. Otherwise, they'd be violating the law Dr. S alludes to.
If they claim that the firings were not for partisan reasons and they discussed them on RNC computers, then they violated a law that prevents them from doing government business on private computers.
I don't think that's the law, RBR. You can do gov business on private computers, but the Presidential Records Act requires that the records be kept - in other words, the private computers cease to be really private.
Right, thanks for the correction, LTG.
In any case, CNN is now reporting that emails from prolonged periods of 2003 are missing from the White House archives. These are emails that are on government computers and clearly were supposed to be kept according to the law that LTG mentioned.
The time period covered includes the time when the Plame-Wilson scandal was developing.
Post a Comment