All Those Missing White House documents...

Posted by Melissa McEwan at 8:01 AM on April 13, 2007.

As Litbrit mentioned last night, the White House has admitted: 1. Using a shadow email system set up through the Republican National Committee. 2. Allowing 22 White House officials to maintain email addresses on this system. 3. Possibly some staffers "used the political account to communicate about official White House business." 4. Possibly those email accounts were used to discuss the prosecutor purge. 5. Possibly some of the emails from those external accounts, possibly including the possible emails about the prosecutor purge, were "lost."

Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) is neither impressed nor fooled: "This sounds like the administration's version of the dog ate my homework. I am deeply disturbed that just when this Administration is finally subjected to meaningful oversight, it cannot produce the necessary information."

You and me both, Patty.

What remains to be seen is whether ...

... whatever incarnation of the I-don't-recall-I-can't-remember-Not-to-my-recollection-It-was-just-an-oversight-It's-not-what-it-looks-like-Oops-we-broke-the-law-but-we-didn't-really-mean-it-we-swear-Can't-produce-the-requested-info-because-it's-lost-Unintentional-Inadvertent-Accidental-Whoopsy-Daisy bullshit excuse is invoked by the administration this time will yet again allow them to weasel their way out of any real consequences.

Fates help us all if it does…


Bush was elected on a wave of apathy plaguing the American populace, which manifested in millions of sighs over the course of the year 2000: There's no difference between the two parties. Bush's then-opponent, Al Gore, has since been proven right about the role internet would come to play in politics, an inevitable healthcare crisis, the need for rigorous diplomacy with Islamic states, alternative fuels' relationship to strengthening national security, his opposition to the Iraq War, and, let us not forget, the concerns about a climate crisis. It is quite possible 9/11 would not have happened on his watch, and it is a certainty the Iraq War would not have happened on his watch. Our national treasury would likely look vastly different, as would nearly every other federal domestic policy.

It's impossible to know precisely what a Gore presidency would look like, but it's safe to say that, whatever it did look like would have a substantially different appearance than Bush's. And that doesn't begin to express how different the current landscape would be had Bush not had a Republican Congress with which to fulfill every last fantastical wet dream of his conservative devotees. That there is no difference between the two parties--or even the men who represented them in a presidential contest seven years ago--is a massive and diabolical myth, perpetuated to the benefit of the extremists who lurked behind the alleged lightweight known as Dubya.

One grand fallacy exposed to a populace still in need of an excuse for their failure of revolution, I fear another is emerging to take its place with a vengeance: We can expect nothing but the worst from our government.

The veracity of this sentiment increases in direct proportion to our collective disinclination to expect the best from our government (but that's a whole other post), and said correlation thusly belies any sense of its intrinsic truth. We absolutely can expect something other than the worst from our government, in spite of shades of this particular sensibility having been around longer than America has been. I daresay it was grumbled by discontents on day two of human history's most rudimentary government--so I'm not hanging the responsibility for this particular brand of ancient distrust on the door of the Bush-occupied White House.

I am, however, intent on holding them accountable for lowering our expectations to an unprecedented fathomage. They've really lowered the bar for what constitutes "the worst" we can expect, and, yet more inimically, lowered the bar for what constitutes "the best." If there's a soul reading this sentence who isn't prepared to hear "Hey--at least it's not the Bush administration!" for the rest of their lives every time the government fucks some shit up, please report to the Shakesville clinic for an injection of much-needed cynicism. And every time I hear it for the rest of my middling days, I will knot my brow into an involuntary frown and feel the clench of my fists as I say through gritted teeth, "We are meant to expect more."

The last thing the American populace needed was a diminishment of their already inadequate expectations, which is nevertheless precisely the one thing that the Bush administration has been spectacularly, consistently competent at delivering. Their increasingly nefarious (and brazen!) betrayals and malefactions have slowly but determinedly sunk into the skulls of the politically disengaged, only to register as further justification for their indifference. Many have slowly but determinedly been drained of fight by outrage fatigue. Even the most passionate among us have been rendered impotent to counter the Bushies' villainy, wholly lacking the ability to generate anything above the sustained outrage at maximum velocity that is our perpetual state.

What's left is the Congress.

They can hold the Bush administration accountable for its many sins. They stand between an America in which its people take a stand and demand more from their government, or an America in which its people jadedly resign themselves to second-rate governance by first-rate criminals. They will determine whether the Bush administration will serve as the benchmark for the worst we ever let happen, or the best we can expect.

Make sure they do it. Tell them the dog ate our emails cannot stand.

Expect the best from them. Demand it--and kill the lie we cannot expect more; kill the ruinous promise of the Bush administration to forever make us settle for less.

This has got to be one of the most hilarious/horrifying things I've ever read:

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.

Whoopsy!

Just wait; it gets better. Now comes the identification of the dog. Guess who?

[GOP officials] 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.

Uh-huh. Woof woof.

As to why Rove Any-Staffer-Not-Rove-In-Particular-Even-Though-Actions-Were-Taken-Only-To-Stop-Rove-Deleting-Emails might have been interested in deleting emails, well, do the names Valerie Plame and Patrick Fitzgerald ring any bells?

In a startling new revelation, CREW has also learned through two confidential sources that the Executive Office of the President (EOP) has lost over five million emails generated between March 2003 and October 2005. The White House counsel's office was advised of these problems in 2005 and CREW has been told that the White House was given a plan of action to recover these emails, but to date nothing has been done to rectify this significant loss of records.

TPM's Paul Kiel explains:

[T]his issue came up in the course of Plame investigation. Among the exhibits attached to CREW's new report, Without A Trace: The Missing White House Emails and the Violations of the Presidential Records, is a January 31, 2006 letter from Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to Scooter Libby's lawyer about pre-trial discovery.

One of the final paragraphs of the seven-page letter reads:

We are aware of no evidence pertinent to the charges against defendant Libby which has been destroyed. In an abundance of caution, we advise you that we have learned that not all email of the Office of Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system.

I'm sure we'll hear more about this.

Indeed. Mind you, those were White House emails, as opposed to the RNC emails discussed above, for which Any-Staffer-Not-Rove-In-Particular-Even-Though-Actions-Were-Taken-Only-To-Stop-Rove-Deleting-Emails is being fingered as the culprit. But seeing as how the RNC is "missing at least four years' worth of e-mail from White House senior adviser Karl Rove," and same White House senior adviser Karl Rove was for a very long time the focus of an investigation which coincidentally happened to notice that "not all the email of the Office of Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system," I smell a rat.

Or an email-eating dog.

[Related reading: Glenn Greenwald discusses "The Bush administration's terrible luck with finding documents."]

Tagged as: scandal, bush, rove, corruption, white house, documents, emails

Melissa McEwan writes and edits the blog Shakespeare's Sister.