Slashdot Mirror
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?
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?