The LA Times’ Tom Hamburger takes a closer look at what I think is still one of the under-reported angles to the prosecutor purge scandal — the alternate communications system the White House set up for staffers.
When Karl Rove and his top deputies arrived at the White House in 2001, the Republican National Committee provided them with laptop computers and other communication devices to be used alongside their government-issued equipment.
The back-channel e-mail and paging system, paid for and maintained by the RNC, was designed to avoid charges that had vexed the Clinton White House — that federal resources were being used inappropriately for political campaign purposes.
Now, that dual computer system is creating new embarrassment and legal headaches for the White House, the Republican Party and Rove’s once-vaunted White House operation.
Democrats say evidence suggests the RNC e-mail system was used for political and government policy matters in violation of federal record preservation and disclosure rules.
As we’ve talked about before, this isn’t trivia. There’s reason to believe that the Bush gang used the alternate system to conceal some of their less-defensible conduct, knowing that communications through the White House system were archived (and could, in theory, be subpoenaed).
Hamburger notes that “some Republicans believe that the huge number of e-mails — many written hastily, with no thought that they might become public — may contain more detailed and unguarded inside information about the administration’s far-flung political activities than has previously been available.” He quotes one activist who acknowledged that there is “concern” about what the emails may contain.
But the real benefit of the article is seeing the White House’s defense for all of this — and noting how wrong it is.
White House officials said the system had been used appropriately and was modeled after one used by the Clinton White House political office in the late 1990s.
“The regular staffers who interface with political organizations have a separate e-mail account, and that’s entirely appropriate,” said White House spokesman Scott M. Stanzel. “The practice is followed to avoid inadvertent violations of the law.”
Stanzel said he did not know how many officials used the separate system. Another White House official called it “a handful.”
This is, at best, misleading. For one thing, Doug Sosnik, White House political director under Clinton, notes that the Clinton White House had a small number of separate computers and cellphones for campaign-related matters. That hardly compares to the RNC handing over laptops to key West Wing insiders in 2001.
But more importantly, we already know that the Bush gang’s operation was far more expansive. As Paul Kiel noted, Karl Rove’s deputy, Scott Jennings, used his RNC address to “communicate with the Justice Department’s Kyle Sampson about the U.S. attorney purge.”
For that matter, 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.
There is, in other words, no big mystery here. Top staffers in the Bush White House, all of whom ostensibly have policy responsibilities and tasks, prefer the unaccountable, unarchived RNC system regardless of circumstances — and have done so from the outset of Bush’s presidency. There is no comparison between this and the separate computers Clinton aides used for the 1996 campaign.
Waxman is pressuring the RNC for access, but according to the LAT piece, the “RNC automatically purges some e-mails after 30 days.”
We may never know what those emails said, but we do know that the Bush gang’s excuse for using an alternate communications system doesn’t add up.