Senate Panel Seeks Missing Karl Rove Emails

Did Rove and other administration officials use party email servers to bypass congressional oversight?Senate Panel Seeks Missing Karl Rove EmailsBy Cliff Montgomery – Apr. 13th, 2007A U.S. Senate panel investigating the firing of eight federal prosecutors authorized subpoenas on Thursday for emails the White House claims may be missing.This comes after a lawyer for the Republican National Committee (RNC) told congressional staff members on Thursday that the RNC is missing at least four years of email correspondence from Bush senior adviser Karl Rove that is being sought as part of investigations into the U.S. attorney scandal, according to the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.GOP officials denied that briefing account, given to the Washington Post by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), House Oversight Committee chairman. But party brass admitted that they took action to prevent Rove–and Rove alone among the two dozen or so White House officials with RNC accounts–from deleting his emails from the RNC server.The RNC told Waxman that move was made in 2005, according to the chairman’s later interview with the Post.In a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Waxman also said that RNC lawyer Rob Kelner mentioned the possibility that Rove had personally deleted the missing emails, all of which date back to before 2005. GOP officials replied that Kelner was simply speaking hypothetically about why emails might be missing for any staffer, and not referring to Rove in particular–but since Rove is indeed one of the staffers in question, the RNC’s spin is a tacit acknowledgment of Waxman’s statement to Gonzales.Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT), rejected the White House claim of any “missing” emails, saying flatly, “I don’t believe that.””It’s not a question of emails being lost, it’s emails they don’t want to retrieve,” said Leahy.”You can’t erase emails, not today,” Leahy continued in an angry speech on the Senate floor. “They’ve gone through too many servers. Those emails are there–they just don’t want to produce them. It’s like the infamous 18-minute gap in the Nixon White House tapes.”Leahy added the White House explanation for the missing emails reminded him of the old schoolboy line, “the dog ate my homework.”He joined the panel’s top Republican, Arlen Specter (R-PA), in calling for the White House to join Congress in setting up a “fair and objective process for investigating this matter.” Congress will investigate in any case, they added.White House spokesman Scott Stanzel replied that the administration “will do–take all reasonable steps to retrieve those messages, and we will certainly ensure that it doesn’t happen again.””We screwed up, and we’re trying to fix it,” added White House spokeswoman Dana Perino. She said she had received no indication the White House broke the law–the usual politician’s attempt to argue the law when no one can argue the facts of the case any longer.But all that may be moot. Waxman retorted that email deletions of White House business may directly violate the Presidential Records Act, which requires an administration to ensure its decisions and deliberations are “adequately documented” and preserved.Waxman has written federal agencies, asking them to preserve any emails they have that were either received from or sent to the White House through RNC email accounts.The White House admitted on Wednesday that some of its staff–including Karl Rove–wrote email messages regarding administration affairs on RNC accounts, and that some messages may have wrongly been deleted.It also acknowledged that some of the emails may have dealt with the firing of eight of the country’s 93 U.S. attorneys last year.On a voice vote, the Senate Judiciary Committee authorized subpoenas for those emails and other White House documents, as well as for records it has been seeking from the Justice Department.The committee also authorized subpoenas for William Moschella–a top Justice Department official–and Scott Jennings, a Rove aide.The votes authorize subpoenas to be issued if the records are not turned over and if Moschella and Jennings refuse to appear before the Senate panel.”This is a political confrontation we don’t need,” Republican Senator of South Carolina Lindsey Graham, a member of the committee, said afterward.The recent disclosures have only inflamed the controversy over what the White House has acknowledged to be the improper use of a political party’s email accounts to conduct official government business.Democrats claim suspicion that Rove and other senior Bush officials were simply using the party accounts, set up by the RNC, to avoid congressional oversight. This may well be part of the angst any political party harbors for another.Then again, this particular worry may have some teeth to it–emails already in the public record do suggest that at least some White House officials went out of their way not to discuss certain matters within the official White House email system.