I mentioned this in passing earlier, and hope you’ll forgive the redundancy, but the fact that White House officials are largely giving up on their email accounts is of growing significance.
Over the last week or so, we’ve learned that White House deputy political director J. Scott Jennings communicated with Justice Department officials about the appointment of a controversial U.S. Attorney through a private email account registered to the RNC. When Karl Rove sends emails, 95% of the time, he avoids his White House account and uses an RNC account. The White House public affairs office reportedly does the same thing. The president has decided not to use email at all because, as he put it, he’s concerned about “different record requests that could happen to a president.”
Now, it’s apparently become standard practice in the West Wing.
The growing controversy over the firing of federal prosecutors and what administration officials knew about it is renewing concerns among Bush aides over the less-than-secret aspect of E-emails. Those concerns were elevated this week when a House chairman asked that all aides retain their E-mails.
But just a week after E-mails in the U.S. attorneys case became a main focus of congressional Democrats probing the firings, several aides said that they stopped using the White House system except for purely professional correspondence.
“We just got a bit lazy,” said one aide. “We knew E-mails could be subpoenaed. We saw that with the Clintons but I don’t think anybody saw that we were doing anything wrong.”
But the release of White House emails to the Democrats and the expanded request for more from Rep. Henry Waxman has iced the system. At least two aides said that they have subsequently bought their own private E-mail system through a cellular phone or Blackberry server. When asked how he communicated, one aide pulled out a new personal cellphone and said, “texting.”
It’s hardly a secret that the Bush gang has an inordinate fondness for secrecy, but this is ridiculous. More importantly, this may go well beyond just White House aides obsessing over privacy.
First, there’s still the Presidential Records Act to consider. The PRA mandates thorough record-keeping, which Rove & Co. apparently hope to avoid. The law isn’t supposed to be optional.
Second, as Josh Marshall noted, these White House methods may be “too clever by half.”
If the president’s aides were using RNC emails or emails from other Republican political committees, they can’t have even the vaguest claim to shielding those communications behind executive privilege.
And third, as Laura Rozen explained, there are security concerns to consider. Rozen noted earlier this week that the White House is a huge electronic surveillance target and by announcing that they’re not using their official email accounts anymore, foreign intelligence agencies might “become curious about the 95% of the government’s business that Karl is lobbing outside the system.” Rozen added today:
A reader who has a security role at a federal agency writes, “On the issue of using outside/unofficial e-mail address from official sites, the CIO at [redacted] has expressly forbade the practice for security reasons as it is all too easy to put sensitive information in an e-mail. … Needless to say, hearing that the WH does not mandate that practice and lets [Rove] do 95% of his e-mailing from a blackberry, presumably with access to an unofficial address, is quite shocking. Still find it absolutely amazing that his clearance has not been revoked.”
Stay tuned.