White House admits it violated law, destroyed emails

Facing a legal deadline, the White House finally, grudgingly, admitted to the federal court that it recycled the backup tapes of White House documents in a way that lost large numbers of documents forever. From the Associated Press via TPM:

The White House has acknowledged recycling its backup computer tapes of e-mail before October 2003, raising the possibility that many electronic messages — including those pertaining to the CIA leak case — have been taped over and are gone forever.

The disclosure came minutes before midnight Tuesday under a court-ordered deadline that forced the White House to reveal information it has previously refused to provide.

Among the e-mails that could be lost are messages swapped by any White House officials involved in discussions about leaking a CIA officer's identity to reporters. [Snip]

If the e-mails were not saved, the White House might have violated two laws requiring preservation of documents that fall into the categories of federal records or presidential records. [Snip]

"If the backup tapes have been erased or taped over or recycled, it's hard to imagine where we will find copies of many lost e-mails," said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel to the National Security Archive, said in an interview Wednesday.

"It appears that the White House has now destroyed the evidence of its misconduct," said Anne Weismann, the chief counsel for the ethics group.

"The White House declaration raises more questions than it answers, specifically the likelihood that for a very significant period of time — March 2003 to October 2003 — the White House recycled its backup tapes," said Weismann.

"As a result there may be no way to recover the missing e-mails from a period in which the U.S. decided to go to war with Iraq, White House officials leaked the identity of Valerie Plame and the Justice Department started a criminal investigation of the White House," the lawyer said.

The sworn statement by Payton did not say how early in the Bush administration the recycling of backup computer tapes began. The statement does not say why the White House stopped recycling backup tapes in October 2003.

In the period of July until October of 2003, the White House was dealing with the Valerie Plame leak controversy. In July, at least three presidential aides leaked Plame's CIA identity to the news media after her husband suggested the administration had manipulated intelligence in the run-up to the war in Iraq. The Justice Department began investigating the leak in September 2003.

It is hard to conceive that this was just a stupid administrative error. Historians who study the Bush administration will need to be experts in criminal forensics.

What is happening with the investigation into firing of Carol Lam, USA San Diego?

Josh Marshall explains the real problems with the firing of Carol lam, the U.S. Attorney in San Diego, CA while she was investigating a corruption case related to the Abramoff case that includes a Congressman, the House Appropriations Committee, high level CIA officers and high level civilians in the Department of Defense.



Josh explains why the firing was at the direction of President Bush.

Greenwald provides a list of "missing" document cases.

Glenn Greenwald has a really interesting article today in Salon. He goes back and reviews a number of cases in which somehow the Bush administration has "lost" documents that law and the courts required them to turn over.

Go sit through the (short) Salon Day Pass and read the article. Then go back and review:

• More on the RNC non-government email system
  (April 12, 2007) posted today.

If you miss the reference, then go back even further to my earlier post:

• Surprise. The emails sent through the RNC have 'accidentally' been lost.
  April 11, 2007

More on the RNC non-government email system

It is clear that the email system provided to 22 current top White House aides was intended to provide a method of doing political work that the Hatch Act states cannot be done on government equipment. But it is also a lot more. It has primarily been an email system designed to be used that was not open to audit or subpoena in lawsuits. Here is what Paul Kiel wrote at TPM Muckraker today on the subject:

it's apparent from emails that the White House avoided the governmental email system because it was vulnerable to investigators. The Hatch Act just provided a good excuse. In 2003, for instance, a lobbyist for Jack Abramoff Kevin Ring wrote him that emails about Abramoff's clients shouldn't be sent to White House addresses because "it might actually limit what they can do to help us, especially since there could be lawsuits, etc." That warning, Ring told The Washington Post, came from Jennifer Farley, a deputy in the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. Susan Ralston, Rove's personal aide, used RNC provided email accounts when corresponding with Abramoff, her old boss.

And remember that Karl Rove reportedly uses his RNC-provided account for approximately 95% of his communication.

In other words, it was an open secret at the White House that the parallel system was to be used for everything you didn't want coming out later -- an understanding that was most likely never made explicit, but a situation that was carefully preserved by not providing apparently any parameters for what sort of communication should be done via the White House system.

The apparent loss of a large number of emails was not an accident. It was the reason the system was used as extensively as it was, especially by Karl Rove, and the reason why clear guidance on how to use the system properly was never made explicit.

This was political. In spite of all the incompetence the Bush administration has displayed in other arenas of government, the one thing they do well is political activities and planning. The lack of clear guidance for using the RNC email system was not accidental. The misuse of the system was not accidental. And most especially, the reported loss of many emails has not been accidental.

This was political, planned and conducted by highly experienced political operators with specific political goals in mind. Anything they tell us to the contrary should be assumed to be a lie - a lie that was planned from the beginning as a cover for the system itself.

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Addendum 10:52 AM CDT
Atrios says it so much better than I do.

Voter Suppression

It's probably a hopeless task, but perhaps someone other than dirty fucking hippie bloggers can understand that Karl Rove's efforts to use the tools of the state to suppress the votes of poor and minority voters is, you know, profoundly wrong in a way which makes him a extremely bad man.

Surprise. The emails sent through the RNC have 'accidentally' been lost.

How tragic. The White House has announced today that the emails sent through the private email accounts at the Republican National Committee have been mishandled and somehow "accidentally" lost. According to the Associated Press:

The White House said Wednesday it had mishandled Republican Party-sponsored e-mail accounts used by nearly two dozen presidential aides, resulting in the loss of an undetermined number of e-mails concerning official White House business.

Congressional investigators looking into the administration's firing of eight federal prosecutors already had the nongovernmental e-mail accounts in their sights because some White House aides used them to help plan the U.S. attorneys' ouster. Democrats were questioning whether the use of the GOP-provided e-mail accounts was proof that the firings were political.

Democrats also have been asking if White House officials are purposely conducting sensitive official presidential business via nongovernmental accounts to get around a law requiring preservation - and eventual disclosure - of presidential records. The announcement of the lost e-mails - a rare admission of error from the Bush White House at a delicate time for the administration's relations with Democratically controlled Capitol Hill - gave new fodder for inquiry on this front.

"This sounds like the administration's version of the dog ate my homework," said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. "I am deeply disturbed that just when this administration is finally subjected to meaningful oversight, it cannot produce the necessary information."

These accounts, which were apparently used by about 20 top aides to the President, were used at times to coordinate the firings of the US attorneys and were also used by the convicted felon Jack Abramoff to conduct some of the business for which he was convicted and is now serving time in federal prison. Since those email accounts were not subject to the archive requirements mandated by law for all White House communications after Nixon resigned, for some odd reason the aides at the white House tended to send sensitive emails over the private accounts rather than the official White House accounts.

Keep in mind, Federal law requires that all White House documents by archived and preserved. That makes those communications available for review if, oh, say the Congress wanted to review them to see if something criminal had been coordinated. But these Republican National Committee accounts used by people such as Karl Rove (See? A surprise there, no?) have been mishandled and many of them have been improperly deleted so that they will not be available to the Waxman Committee as was anticipated.

Karl Rove learned a lot from Richard M. Nixon. Nixon himself once said that his biggest mistake was to have not destroyed the White House tapes before they were released. Anyone who does not know that the RNC emails were used to avoid scrutiny and were purposely disposed of simply does not understand the nature of the Republican occupation of the White House.

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Addendum 10:31PM CDT
Too good not to include. Kagro X says the name for this scandal should be "DogAte."

This is the best comment in the post on the subject by EmptyWheel at the Next Hurrah. Emptywheel thinks this report is just a trial baloon by the Bushies to see how much flack they'll get if they try it seriously. The techies who commented don't think anything is likely to be missing, just hard to find. Hope they are right.