Lawyer: Rove Didn't Mean to Delete Email Apr 13 12:50 PM US/Eastern By LAURIE KELLMAN Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP) - Karl Rove's lawyer on Friday dismissed the notion that President Bush's chief political adviser intentionally deleted his own e-mails from a Republican-sponsored server, saying Rove believed the communications were being preserved in accordance with the law. The issue arose because the White House and Republican National Committee have said they may have lost e-mails from Rove and other administration officials. Democratically chaired congressional committees want those e-mails for their probe of the firings of eight federal prosecutors. "His understanding starting very, very early in the administration was that those e-mails were being archived," Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, said. The prosecutor probing the Valerie Plame spy case saw and copied all of Rove's e-mails from his various accounts after searching Rove's laptop, his home computer, and the handheld computer devices he used for both the White House and Republican National Committee, Luskin said. The prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, subpoenaed the e-mails from the White House, the RNC and Bush's re-election campaign, he added. "There's never been any suggestion that Fitzgerald had anything less than a complete record," Luskin said. Any e-mails Rove deleted were the type of routine deletions people make to keep their inboxes orderly, Luskin said. He said Rove had no idea the e-mails were being deleted from the server, a central computer that managed the e-mail. On Thursday, one Democratic committee chairman said his understanding was that the RNC believed Rove might have been deleting his e-mails and in 2005 took action to preserve them in accordance with the law and pending legal action. The mystery of the missing e-mails is just one part of a furor over the firings of eight federal prosecutors that has threatened Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' job and thrown his Justice Department into turmoil. For now, Bush is standing by his longtime friend from Texas, who has spent weeks huddled in his fifth-floor conference room at the Justice Department preparing to tell his story to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. New documents released Friday by the Justice Department may shed additional light, but their release prompted Gonzales' one-time chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, to postpone a closed-door interview with congressional investigators. The missing e-mails posed some of the weightiest questions of a sprawling political and legal conflict between the Bush administration and Democrats in Congress. Democrats are questioning whether any White House officials purposely sent e-mails about official business on the RNC serverâthen deleted them, in violation of the lawâto avoid scrutiny. White House officials say they can't answer that question, but they say the administration is making an honest effort to recover any lost e-mails. Luskin said Rove didn't know that deleting e-mails from his RNC inbox also deleted them from the RNC's server. That system was changed in 2005. Rove voluntarily allowed investigators in the Plame case to review his laptop and copy the entire hard drive, from which investigators could have recovered even deleted e-mails, Luskin said. As the investigation was winding down, Luskin said, prosecutors came to his office and reviewed all the documentsâincluding e-mailsâhe had collected to be sure both sides a complete set. Luskin said he has not heard from Fitzgerald's office and said that, if Fitzgerald believed any e-mails were destroyed, he would have called. Fitzgerald's office declined comment. The White House did not immediately respond to Luskin's comments. A lawyer for the RNC told congressional investigators that the RNC may be able to recover some of those e-mails sent from August 2004 on. That's when the RNC put a hold on an automatic purge policy. The RNC lawyer, Rob Kelner, also said that the Republican committee has none of Rove's e-mails on its server prior to 2005, possibly because Rove deleted them, according to House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif. Sometime in 2005, the RNC took action solely to prevent Rove from deleting his e-mails on that server. One reason for specifying Rove, Waxman said, appears to have been pending legal action against him. It was unclear, Waxman said, whether the RNC had or would be able to recover e-mails written by any White House officials, including Rove, and sent on the committee's account. The White House and RNC said they are taking action to recover as many lost e-mails as possible. Some 50 past and current White House aides had the RNC accounts, according to the administration, to avoid using government resources to conduct political business. http://www.breitbart.com/print.php?id=D8OFRA1O0&show_article=1
Rove E-Mail Sought by Congress May Be Missing RNC Took Away His Access to Delete Files in 2005 By Michael Abramowitz Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, April 13, 2007; A01 A lawyer for the Republican National Committee told congressional staff members yesterday that the RNC is missing at least four years' worth of e-mail from White House senior adviser Karl Rove that is being sought as part of investigations into the Bush administration, according to the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. GOP officials took issue with Rep. Henry Waxman's account of the briefing and said they still hope to find the e-mail as they conduct forensic work on their computer equipment. But they acknowledged 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 e-mails from the RNC server. Waxman (D-Calif.) said he was told the RNC made that move in 2005. In a letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, Waxman said the RNC lawyer, Rob Kelner, also raised the possibility that Rove had personally deleted the missing e-mails, all dating back to before 2005. GOP officials said Kelner was merely speaking hypothetically about why e-mail might be missing for any staffer and not referring to Rove in particular. The disclosures helped fan the controversy over what the White House has acknowledged to be the improper use of political e-mail accounts to conduct official government business. Democrats are suspicious that Rove and other senior officials were using the political accounts, set up by the RNC, to avoid scrutiny from Congress. E-mails already in the public record suggest that at least some White House officials were mindful of a need not to discuss certain matters within the official White House e-mail system. Yesterday, congressional Democrats denounced the White House after administration officials acknowledged this week that e-mails dealing with official government business, including the firing of U.S. attorneys, may have been lost because they were improperly sent through political messaging accounts. Twenty-two White House officials -- and a total of about 50 over the course of the administration -- have been given such accounts to avoid doing political work on government equipment. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, accused the White House of lying about the matter. He was joined by the ranking Republican on the committee, Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.), in calling on the White House to join Congress in setting up a "fair and objective process for investigating this matter." "You can't erase e-mails, not today," Leahy said in an angry speech on the Senate floor. "They've gone through too many servers. Those e-mails are there -- they just don't want to produce them. It's like the infamous 18-minute gap in the Nixon White House tapes." White House officials rejected that explanation. "What we have done has been forthcoming, honest," spokeswoman Dana Perino said. "We are trying to understand to the best of our ability the universe of the e-mails that were potentially lost, and we are taking steps to make sure that we use the forensics that are available to retrieve any of those that are lost." The disclosures came as White House counsel Fred F. Fielding rejected demands for a compromise on providing testimony and records to Congress related to the prosecutor firings. In a letter to the heads of the House and Senate Judiciary committees, Fielding said the White House is standing firm with its "unified offer," which would include providing a limited set of documents. The White House has proposed allowing Rove and other aides to be interviewed privately, without a transcript and not under oath. Fielding also wrote that it "remains our intention to collect e-mails and documents" from the RNC and other outside accounts used by White House officials. The Senate Judiciary Committee approved, but did not issue, new subpoenas for the Justice Department yesterday. Gonzales, meanwhile, has been preparing for a pivotal appearance on Tuesday before the committee, including mock testimony sessions lasting up to five hours a day, officials said. E-mails from Rove and other White House officials potentially figure in a number of congressional investigations. Democrats are seeking the RNC e-mails as part of an effort to determine the extent of Rove's role in firing the U.S. attorneys and the alleged politicization at the General Services Administration. The RNC yesterday turned over to the White House a copy of e-mail records for administration officials still on the RNC server to determine whether any of them are privileged or whether they can be provided to congressional investigators. Officials indicated that they would include post-2005 e-mails from Rove. GOP officials said they are also trying to determine whether they can recover other e-mail that may have been deleted through regular purges of e-mails or by deliberate deletion by White House staff. Waxman said the RNC indicated that it had destroyed all e-mail records from White House officials in 2001, 2002 and 2003. In 2004, the RNC exempted White House officials from its policy of purging all e-mail after 30 days, so any lost e-mail after that date would have been presumably deleted by a White House official. "We do not know what exists pre-2005 -- we are in the process of trying to determine what, if anything, does," RNC spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt said. Another GOP official familiar with the inner workings of the RNC said officials have no evidence that Rove had deliberately deleted any e-mail. Kelner referred calls to the RNC, and the White House said Rove was not available to comment. Republican officials also said there was nothing nefarious in their decision to take precautions to preserve Rove's e-mail. According to Waxman, Kelner told his staff that the RNC commenced a program in 2005 that took away Rove's ability to personally delete his e-mails. GOP officials said that was done only to preserve records for possible use in legal settings, not out of any concern that Rove would seek to scrub his e-mail account. Erasing an e-mail message beyond hope of retrieval is not easy, experts said. In general, deleting any file on a computer does not make it go away, because the computer normally will erase not the file but rather its own records of it. "The data is not gone until it is overwritten," said John Christopher, senior data-recovery engineer at Novato, Calif.-based DriveSavers. The "deleted" file will remain on the hard drive, where it can still be found and read until other data are saved to the same spot. The same thing happens with e-mail: Trashing a message only means that the mail program clears its records of where it had filed that e-mail in its own database. Paul Robichaux, a principal with the Redmond, Wash., technology services firm 3Sharp and the author of three books about Microsoft's e-mail software, compared it to a library that removes the entry for a book from its card catalogue: "The book is still on the shelf."
I guess Henry Waxman will have to call in Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson for consultations on the significance of this matter. Maybe Fox news had something to do with it, too. Do you suppose Rush Limbaugh might have told Rove to do this? I sure hope democrats get this all straightened out.
I see we have another ditto headed Kool Aid drinker on the loose... <img src=http://www.bay-of-fundie.com/img/2006/bush-kool-aid-bof.jpg>
This is why the White House should not even attempt to cooperate with thugs like Leahy and Waxman. Their only interest is in partisan warfare. Firing US Attorneys is none of congress' business. Bush should have said that from the get go. If they file subpoenas, go to court and fight them. Clinton certainly used that option plenty.
April 12, 2007 White House E-mails from 2001-03 Deleted, but Rove Messages Kept from '05 On Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, just released a fascinating letter that he sent to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. In the letter, Waxman asked Gonzales to take steps to protect e-mails in the possession of the Justice Department relating to the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, but Waxman had another purpose in releasing the letter -- he wanted to tell the press and public how big the scale of the missing White House e-mail scandal is. And it's pretty big. Waxman was told today by a Republican National Committee attorney Rob Kelner that "roughly 50 White House officials have had e-mail accounts on RNC servers" at some point since President Bush came to office, accounts that were controlled by the RNC. "Mr. Kelner stated that to his knowledge, the earliest e-mails records of White House officials on RNC servers are from 2004. Although White House officials used RNC e-mails since 2001, the RNC has apparently destroyed all e-mail records from White House officials from 2001, 2002, and 2003." Waxman added that the RNC "currently has e-mail records for approximately 35 of these 50 officials. This means that the RNC appears to have no e-mail records for approximately 15 White House officials who had RNC e-mail accounts." The RNC's official policy was to delete e-mails after 30 days, but "as a result of unspecified legal inquiries, a 'hold' was placed on this e-mail destruction policy for the accounts of White House officials in August 2004." Kelner reportedly told Waxman that he was unsure "whether the hold was consistently maintained from August 2004, but he asserted that for this period, the RNC does have a large volume of White House e-mails." The "hold" also would not have prevented individual White House official from deleting their own e-mails. Now comes the money part of Waxman's letter: "Mr. Kelner's briefing raised particular concems about Karl Rove, who according to press reports used his RNC account for 95 percent of his communications. According to Mr. Kelner, although the hold started in August 2004, the RNC does not have any e-mails prior to 2005 for Mr. Rove. Mr. Kelner did not give any explanation for the e-mails missing from Mr. Rove's account, but he did acknowledge that one possible explanation is that Mr. Rove personally deleted his e-mails from the RNC server." Mr. Kelner also explained that starting in 2005, the RNC began to treat Mr. Rove's emails in a special fashion. At some point in 2005, the RNC commenced an automatic archive policy for Mr. Rove, but not for any other White House officials. According to Mr. Kelner, this archive policy removed Mr. Rove's ability to personally delete his e-mails from the RNC server. Mr. Kelner did not provide many details about why this special policy was adopted for Mr. Rove. But he did indicate that one factor was the presence of investigative or discovery requests or other legal concerns. It was unclear from Mr. Kelner's briefing whether the special archiving policy for Mr. Rove was consistently in effect after 2005." Waxman added: "The Committee knows from its investigation that some federal agencies and departments received e-mails from White House officials using their RNC e-mail accounts. The only existing record of these e-mails may reside on seryers or backup devices within the control of federal entities. For this reason, the Committee requests that you preserve all e-mails received from White House officials who used 'gwb43.com,' 'georgewbush.com,' 'rnchq.org' or other nongovernmental e-mail accounts. The Committee also asks you to preserve any e-mails sent to White House officials at any of these accounts. In addition, I request that you provide the Committee with an inventory of any e-mail communications in the agency's possession or control that meet the description in the preceding paragraph. This inventory should include the name and e-mail address of the sender, the name and e-mail address of the recipient, the date of the e-mail, and a brief description of the subject of the e-mail. This inventory should be provided to the Committee by May 3, 2007." http://www.politico.com/blogs/thecr...eleted_but_Rove_Messages_Kept_from_05_On.html
WASHINGTON D.C.- For the first time the Bush White house is now admitting that it used private email accounts in an effort to sidestep Federal laws requiring that all White House communications be persevered. According to an undisclosed White House official the emails were used to hide the Bush administration's "dirty work" which included, blackmail, bribery, intimidation, and online psychics. "We screwed up big time," White House Spokeswomen Dana Perino acknowledged to reporters, "over 5 million emails are gone but at least they are not as missing as Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction. In fact, we know exactly where they are...digesting in the entrails of Karl Rove." All emails send and received by the White House through private email accounts were stored on portable USB flash drives that were hidden in a candy jar in the White House kitchen. Apparently, in an effort to satisfy his sweet tooth top White House advisor Karl Rove inadvertently ate the USB flash drives, mistaking them for Jolly Ranchers. "I take a handful of those things every hour," Rove admitted, "I never even noticed that I ate over 350 USB flash drives...they tasted exactly like Jolly Ranchers." The missing emails are now causing the Bush administration a world of trouble and accusations that the administration is not neither honest or open with the American public. House leader Democrat Nancy Pelosi told reporters, "I am sick of the Republicans hiding behind a veil of secrecy...its time for them to be more transparent. I will push this cause by asking President Bush and other male Republican officials to come over to my Capital Hill office and disrobing before me to prove their openness to the American people." Meanwhile, Karl Rove told reporters that next week he plans to inadvertently eat former White House aid Scooter Libby and current Attorney General Alberto Gonzales saying, "my doctor told me it won't help my weight problem...but hey sometimes you gotta take one for the team."
Well it sure is fun watching the republicans and their supporters attempting to defend the indefensible! The GOP just never in their wildest dreams (nightmares?) thought they would be held to account. ROFLMFAO!!!!!! Where are the "Swiftboat Veterans" when you need them?