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White House E-mail Scandal Widens
Spamicles alerts us to a report just issued (PDF) by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. At least 88 White House officials used Republican National Committee email accounts for government business. The RNC has destroyed at least some of the emails from 51 of those officials. Law requires emails sent by officials to be stored or recorded. There is evidence that White House lawyers and the (current) Attorney General knew of this but did not act to stop it. From the article: "These e-mail accounts were used by White House officials for official purposes, such as communicating with federal agencies about federal appointments and policies... Given the heavy reliance by White House officials on RNC e-mail accounts, the high rank of the White House officials involved, and the large quantity of missing e-mails, the potential violation of the Presidential Records Act may be extensive."
The issue is that the emails were presumably written while the officials were acting in an official capacity or could have been. The accounts were from a political party, and it is a wee bit suspicious that now that there are probes going on that the information was not being saved. Being by public officials normally subject to the act they should have retained enough of the records to demonstrate that they weren't a subject to the act. That way if there were any sort of investigation they could be looked at examined and then considered to be unrelated to matters. This is the same if you were to be investigated for a computer crime, you would be required to hand over any and all information relevant as well as decrypt any encrypted files. Failure to do so would result in sanctions as well as your guilt being presumed.
That is largely what is happening here. If the President and his staff are unhappy because their personal correspondence is now the fodder for investigations, perhaps they should have behaved in an appropriate manner when it wasn't about them. Kind of ironic, that all of a sudden an absence of evidence really means innocence, right, I mean that is what you were getting at right? In this case a lack of evidence is clearly a powerful indication of innocence.
The Republican party has really no basis for complaining, they have themselves conducted these sorts of witch hunts over far less, and in this case their own secrecy is largely what is keeping the investigators from making a fair assessment of the bounds of the investigation. If they would have just provided the emails, then the investigators would look through them determine the innocent, and move on. I mean why would an individual who hadn't committed a crime ever wish to have information remain confidential?
Talkshow host Tom Hartman said that he can't help coming to the conclusion that the endless investigations into Clinton's Christmas card lists, travel agent's activities, and sexual peccadilloes was an effort to sour the public on the process of impeachment, and make whatever crimes the next president would do seem like partisan politics. It's hard not to start thinking this way.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Wrong answer, Bob. They used several accounts at the RNC, at political campaigns, and other orgs. That's one reason it's so hard to track. When it first broke, two servers (both controlled by Republican party organizations) disappeared off the internet. Both of which supposedly carried Whitehouse staff e-mail.
Leave the gun, take the cannoli -- Clemenza, The Godfather
Well, to be fair to Paul and, for that matter, any other candidate that participates in those shams we now seem to call debates, ninety seconds isn't enough time to articulate any sort of monetary policy more complicated than "we print too much money". Knowing that encapsulated in that obviously broad-brush oversimplified soundbyte way are his actual concerns about controlling the money supply via interest rate adjustments, and his concerns about foreign assets (particularly oil assets) being heavily traded upon the dollar. Both of these things he has talked about before, just not in the context of the ninety second answer.
OTOH, he was the only Republican who was willing to say that nasty things happen to America sometimes because of blowback. Everyone else was too busy wrapping themselves in the Flag and Reagan's corpse to say anything meaningful on foreign policy.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
A call which, incidentally, probably wasn't illegal, especially since he paid for it, which is what is always left out of the story. He made the call using a calling card, billing it to the DNC, which incidentally how it was discovered. He just physically used his official phone, but that's not actually that damning, because the president and VP themselves have always had a bit more freedom in using the White House for political work than, say, the Senate or other government buildings. It's the president's residence and political work get done out of said residence, despite it being a government building and having government offices in it. As long as the president is okay with the VP's behavior in the white house, it's presumably okay.
Anyway, it have have been allowed, or might have been prohibited, although as Al Gore pointed out, there didn't actually seem to be anyone to regulate it. That isn't as inane as it sounds, because there actually are lawyers that are supposed to figure out things like that working for the white house, but 'use of the white house property by the president and VP' has, in general, been unregulated, and there literally don't seem to be any laws about it. The big one that stops that sort of behavior, the Hatch Act, specifically doesn't apply to them.
But it's interesting how a call that no one disputes would have been legal and have exactly the same effect for all involved had he walked out into the hall and used a visitor payphone got all the press coverage, yet Bush's politizing of the Department of Justice went unnoticed. And I'm not even talking about the USA scandal, which are, at least, supposed to be political positions. (Although you still can't kick people out because they aren't making up bogus cases against Democrats and investigating Republicans.) I'm talking about partisan hiring of positions protected by civil serivce rules, like AUSAs and district judges.
If we're taking bets, that's what they're tying to hide, BTW. Firing USAs for random reasons looks really bad, and there are a few of them that open them up to charges of obstructing justice if it was to screw up an active investigation, but barring that is at least legal. But some of the irregular hirings at the DoJ, and other places, the ones where they hired partisan operatives for by-law-non-partisan positions, were flatly, undisputably, illegal.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
The following steps are indicated. Order is significant:
1) Impeach Cheney.
2) Impeach the sock puppet.
3) Try Karl Rove for treason.
4) Ferret out every GOP minion, operative, flunkie, and vote-rigger who had a hand in Bush's election(s) and investigate the life out of them.
5) Get a free press and use it.
Good luck, US. You're gonna need it.
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
You all seem to be missing the obvious.
I agree that the Dems have lost their focus on occasion. They have never been able to keep a sharp focus like the Republicans. I also agree that some Dems in office now are bums and crooks who should be kicked out of office. They are, however, the least evil of the choices right now by far. The corruption and incompetence, and rank stupidity of republicans right now is far past comical.
As to what you've all missed.. The Dems don't REALLY have power in congress right now. They have a decent majority in the House which is good but they don't have the 60% required quash a Republican fillibuster. Remember when Republicans were going to re-write 200+ years of proceedure to stop minority filibusters before they started regularly doing them again?
In the Senate it's more bleak. The Democrats do not have a majority at all. Lieberman bailed from the Democratic party when he lost the the primary nomination for being in bed with the Democrats and Bush in particular. Lieberman has had a man-crush on Bush for years now. Lieberman SAYS he's working with the Dems now (because he's from a blue state and he'll lose next time if he doesn't convince just enough Dems that he's one of them. Lieberman just campaigned for a REPUBLICAN from his state. It's gotten so bad that the head of his new party, Independent Democratic Party, has asked him to resign so that the Governor can assign a replacement. He left the Democrats because the majority didn't want him, now his new party is kicking him out for being a closet Republican. The senate can go either way with independents but it's basically 50-50. It's certainly not 60% or super-majority in favor of Democrats.
The reality is, politics is dirty. There's an old saying that you know you've got something in Politics when everyone leaves the table unhappy.
The thing that really has the left wing of the Democratic party up in arms is the folding on the Iraq funding. Unfortunately, the reality is, Dems didn't have enough votes to shoot down a Presidential veto and they had to add ear-marks to get enough people to sign on to even get it to pass. The Dems are TERRIBLE at 'reading the crowd' even when 70% of Americans want us out of Iraq.
In their defense, however, they were in an untenable situation. They had zero chance of getting that bill through and there was a good chance that the decades of Republican media buildup would have been successful in portraying it as the Dems fault.
IMHO, If I were the Democratic leadership I would have sent that bill back over and over and over, every week if possible. I'd have made Bush veto funding the troops over and over. I'd have put out the party members to simply say "why does President Bush refuse to fund the troops? First it was the body armor and the Humvee armor, now he won't sign the funding bill.". That's it, nothing more.. over and over. In fact, they could have stripped appropriations one by one and threatened their own members that they were in it now appropriations or not.. or they'd be flip-floppers at their next election cycle.
Bottom line, the Dems are anything but all powerful in Congress right now. They have enough power to assign committee seats and put up legislation but they don't have enough juice to push anything all the way through if the Republicans and Bush say no.
The plan now isn't to bring Republicans down. The plan now is to maneuver, politically, so that they stand to gain more power in 2008. Unfortunately, I suspect that Dems will control both Congress and the WH in 2008. I think it's dangerous to vest too much power in one party (as we've seen). The good thing is, we've seen a lot of new (young) Democratic blood come in. We've seen a lot of war vets who seem to be in for the right reasons. I hope they can hold the corruption back for a while.
I would suggest that I'd like to see some of the old Democratic blood (particularly the corrupt) taken out in 2008 by young un-tainted Republicans but Rove and his Ilk h
I'm not feeling witty so bite me
This isn't really in response to any one comment, but more or less the general "Americans Don't Give a Shit" genre of comments that appear on this story. I've been thinking about the general sense of apathy and while I think a lot of them have been discussed inside and out (corruption, money in politics, biased media, lack of political options) one I've been thinking about lately is the lack of communities:
1. US College System & Culture encourages people to move and "get away" from their families, friends, and the "village" of people they grew up with and around. While I'm not that old, at 28, even with this short amount of time, very few people I've kept in touch with from highschool live "back home". You develop friends who are in your income bracket, who have similar interests, and usually similar thoughts politically. It's much easier not to care about the minimum wage if you're not affected by it.
2. Mass Media: TV is the "Bread and circus" of the day. I'll admit it - most of the time I come home after work, flop down on the couch and watch TV. I'm not sitting on my porch and seeing my neighbors when they walk by. It's in the entertainment industry's intrest to try and keep us there by making us numb to everything else by constantly bombarding us with sex, violence and danger. And, lets face it, it's interesting. There's a lot of good entertainment there. Judgment on the medium aside, it keeps us inside with little community interation.
3. Cars: The US is a car society. People do not walk, with an exception of a few cities. If you drive 30 minutes to work instead of working near where you live, you don't meet people in your neighborhood. There are some exceptions: church and school for example. But look at those two communities and how active they are pollitically. They're brought together by a common purpose, but I bet if you did a survey of people who attend church or have children in school they'd be more politically active than the average.
There are a lot of other things that contribute, and I'm not even suggesting that this is the primary factor, but I don't see it discussed and thought I would put it out there.
-nb
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