‘This sounds like the administration’s version of the dog ate my homework’

April 12, 2007

There has to come a point at which the White House’s almost cartoonish corruption becomes so painfully ridiculous, even the most mild-tempered observers among us throw their arms up in disgust and say, “Impeach the whole gang.”

We’ve learned in recent weeks about White House staffers, fearful of accountability, using an alternate communications system. On Tuesday, Dan Froomkin noted, “The slowly-unfolding disclosure that some White House aides use non-government e-mail servers to conduct official business may soon be reaching scandal proportions.”

Yesterday should remove all doubt.

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. […]

[Spokesman Scott Stanzel] said some e-mails have been lost because the White House lacked clear policies on complying with Presidential Records Act requirements.

Before 2004, for instance, e-mails to and from the accounts were typically automatically deleted every 30 days along with all other RNC e-mails. Even though that was changed in 2004, so that the White House staffers with those accounts were excluded from the RNC’s automatic deletion policy, some of their e-mails were lost anyway when individual aides deleted their own files, Stanzel said.

He could not say what had been lost, and said the White House is working to recover as many as they can.

Sure they are. I bet the Bush gang is really losing sleep over all of this.

And if the White House’s excuses sound familiar to you, you’re not the only one. “This sounds like the administration’s version of the dog ate my homework,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) said. “I am deeply disturbed that just when this administration is finally subjected to meaningful oversight, it cannot produce the necessary information.”

Now that the White House has “inadvertently lost” evidence pertaining to an ongoing investigation, questions abound.

First, the White House’s ability to argue that Rove, Miers, and others shouldn’t have to testify before congressional committees just got a lot tougher. Lawmakers cannot review these staffers’ correspondence — because the White House “lost” it — so their sworn testimony will be all the more significant.

Second, The Politico reported that several reporters were “invited to a private White House briefing on the situation … and it’s really bad for the White House. This is just what Waxman needs keep the issue alive, possibly until the end of time.”

Third, aren’t there usually backups for this kind of thing?

I feel really bad about the server problems the White House/RNC seems (no, not a typo — they appear to be a single entity) to be having on the email front. Believe me, I run a small business that is heavily dependent on cranky servers and other gizmos. So I know how hard this can be. But I think this might be a case where that NSA ‘terrorist surveillance program’ may really come in handy. I’m told the NSA has some very capable data recovery tools they’ve developed.

And even if those guys are too busy hunting al Qaida, doesn’t the FBI have some pretty good forensic computer geeks? What happens when, say, a company like Enron (okay, perhaps not a great example) says some emails were ‘mishandled’ and now are gone forever. I guess that’s just the end of it, right? Normally, it’s not kosher for a government agency to offer direct assistance to a private entity or political organization. But, hey, we’re pretty far down that road I guess. So let’s have the FBI go down and take a look at these servers and see if these emails have really disappeared forever.

And fourth, just a few days ago, a White House official told the LAT that only a “handful” of aides use an alternate communications system. That’s false — the White House said Wednesday that it “may have lost what could amount to thousands of messages sent through a private e-mail system used by political guru Karl Rove and at least 50 other top officials.”

I’m hesitant to draw a direct comparison to Nixon during Watergate, but … wait, I’m not hesitant at all. The Bush White House appears to have intentionally circumvented the Presidential Records Act to avoid accountability for its nefarious conduct. When the investigation heats up, evidence goes missing.

If there are still any lingering doubts about the seriousness of this scandal, they should be gone now.

Let’s put it this way, if there are NOT backups somewhere, whomever runs these servers are not following standard practice. That means they’re either incredibly sloppy or intensionally hiding information. I’m usually willing to chalk things up to stupidity before assuming guile, but not with this bunch.

Question for lawyers: would willfully circumventing the Presidential Records Act be as much of a “high crime” as perjury?

  • While their at it, why not bring in the (RNC) IT guys before Congress. Ask them some serious questions about email/backup policies for their servers.

  • Why is the White House handling Republican Party email accounts in the first place? Isn’t that itself a violation of the Hatch Act?

    If it was “Republican Party mishandles Republican Party accounts,” then it would just be funny, another joke for the Daily Show. If it was “White House mishandles White House accounts,” then it would worse, but par for the course (remember the “missing” emails in the Fitzgerald investigation). But no. Instead we have a Hatch Act violation rolled into a Presidential Records Act violation. It’s a tight little ball of corruption.

    I paid my way through college working as a system administrator. I’ve had to undelete more than my share of email so I feel confident in saying that these emails are somewhere. They are likely on the sender’s computer, the server, or at least one of the recipients’ computers.

    Bud@1 is right too. If there is no backup, someone is extremely negligent and should be fired. Backups are standard practice.

    And even if they are “deleted” from all these machines, they can be recovered by forensic analysis. As Josh Marshall notes, our intelligence community has the ability to reconstruct (with great time and expense) nearly every thing that was ever written to the disk. This is why the Department of Defense physically destroys storage media. Deleting a file or using a tool like shred may be suitable if you sell your old disk on eBay, but it doesn’t prevent serious forensic analysis from finding your “lost” bits.

  • Tampering with evidence—obstruction official government business—impeding a Congressional investigation—obstruction of justice—theft (yes—theft. Performing blatantly-political partisanry while on the taxpayer’s timeclock is called “theft of wages.” You can get fired for that one.) Violations of the PRA (demonstrated malice and intent only makes it worse, Karl). Destruction of government property (if those emails were created on Uncle Sammie’s clock, then it doesn’t matter who the blasted machines belong to; the content belong to Uncle Sammie).

    Gitmo is definitely not big enough to hold all these guys. I wonder how much it would cost to rent part of the polar ice-cap—and build some really big cages….

  • The e-mails could be in one of 3 tiers – individual e-mail client backups, the e-mail server live data store or the server backups. For an e-mail to disappear, all of the following had to have happened:

    (1) Not a single recipient of the e-mail had it ever backed up/archived to a local/network storage device, and if it had been, those backups were erased.
    (2) The e-mail server deleted the e-mail.
    (3) There is no tape/disk backup of that e-mail.

    ‘I willfully ate my own homework’ sounds about right to me.

  • I wonder how much it would cost to rent part of the polar ice-cap—and build some really big cages….

    Bad idea … a little global warming, and whoosh, they escape out the bottom of the cages. Why not just put a grill over the top of Mauna Loa instead?

  • Another day, another scandal. Lee Iacocca is right. Where are our leaders?

    Despite their claims to the contrary, I’ll bet there’s some very clear rules that BushCo broke, and that they will, yet again, get away with breaking them. And I am getting really sick of hearing myself say that.

    Dems should have filed the articles of impeachment already for the FISA law violations. BushCo admitted violating the law, and it’s obvious that they changed course in an attempt to stave off prosecution. They’re pulling the same stunt now with the email scandal:

    …The White House has now shut off employees’ ability to delete e-mails on the separate accounts, and is briefing staffers on how to better make determinations about when — and when not — to use them…

    See? All better. No more laws being broken (not that they ever were) please move along.

    I think the Dems should be ashamed of themselves. It’s nice to see the Republicrooks squirming and worrying about 2008, but the constitution has been blatantly violated and the Dems are still acting like they’re worried about getting called names by Fox bobbleheads.

    Impeach them. Now.

  • If the “Audacity of Hope” describes the Democrats these days, then the audacity of deceit perfectly describes Republicans. The ghost of Rose Mary Woods is alive and well in the White House.

  • Subpeona those computers! Get them in the hands of experts to wring back to life every damn email that ever passsed through them! Do it now, before the actual computers become just as lost as the rest of the administration!!!!!

  • Sad as it may be, the general public is way behind where we are on the malfeasance and criminality of the Bush administration. The reason for this is pretty simple: the incompetence and complicity of the press, combined with the apathy of the general public.

    As I’ve been saying all along, we should not be talking about impeachment. We should be talking about hearings. Once we have hearings, the case for impeachment will make itself.

    Well, we’re there. We’re having hearings, and the case for impeachment is being made, without anyone actually saying the word. It is just going to take time, and while that time is passing, more people are dying, more CO2 is being pumped into the atmosphere, the endemic economic problems get worse, and so on.

  • Bad idea … a little global warming, and whoosh, they escape out the bottom of the cages.

    Actually, that depends on the cages.

    One other thing: despite a photoshop hoax muddying the waters with a fake company brochure in Rove’s hands, it’s apparently true that Karl Rove was in Chattanooga — where at least some of the RNC/gwb43.com e-mail servers are — on a hastily arranged Bush visit on February 21 .

    If he was there — and there’s at least tacit confirmation by a Chattanooga paper to back that up, although the story seems to rely on one of the hoaxsters for that — then Rove had both opportunity and motive to head over to those IT companies and personally (not electronically!) verify/direct that e-mails were (to be) “lost.” At any rate, the gist of this hypothesis doesn’t really depend on Rove’s presence; any other high level GOP/White House staff on Air Force One that day might have paid SmarTech and/or Coptix facilities a visit and gathered the information or given the order.

    Wild goose chase? Maybe, sure. Maybe not.

  • Aside from circumvention of the Presidential Records Act isn’t there a national security issue with the use of systems and servers outside of government control?

  • How can we be certain that a hostile foreign government or other entity didn’t copy all of these emails and then delete them so our government wouldn’t have access to our own national secrets? How do we know this wasn’t the intention of whoever (Rove?) ordered this alternative program? Sounds like potential treason to me.

  • If I understand correctly, the RNC e-mail system is hosted on a private system whose owners sound savvy enough to have avoided leaving incriminating evidence all over the place.

    Also if I understand correctly, the staffers were given personal laptops for “off-the-record” e-mails. Those are the computers that need to be subpoenaed as quickly as possible. I guarantee that there will be a few folks who, like most of the rest of us, soft-delete spam but leave essentially all the rest of the stuff resident forever in case they need to refer back to it for something. Moreover, this being government, I’m pretty sure that many of those e-mails will have been sent to multiple addressees, and some of those people will want to hang on to the message sent to them by Mr. Rove or Mr. Cheney or whomever.

  • #15: If I understand correctly, the RNC e-mail system is hosted on a private system whose owners sound savvy enough to have avoided leaving incriminating evidence all over the place.

    Sure, but if they can be put together with Rove or some other White House/GOP staffer on 2/21 in Chattanooga, you’re potentially into good old-fashioned gumshoe /special prosecutor / obstruction of justice territory. You wouldn’t even need the e-mails themselves anymore, the coverup would be the main deal. Then the question just becomes which IT junior vice president would give up Rove or whomever first — assuming, of course, that there’s anything to give up. But that Chattanooga trip seems like a heck of a coincidence to me; and if it isn’t a coincidence, you sure wouldn’t want to not be the first to confirm that.

  • When the day comes that any political leader, and his/her staff, simply admit that they were wrong, and then ask for our forgiveness, I’ll faint with hope that we as a nation can find ourselves out of this big mess. The WH crowd has no moral standing in my mind as they have far too often shown a proclivity to bend, ignore or break the law at the great expense to our nation’s heritage.

    The ancillary support of such lawlessness offered by the likes of Lieberman, FOXNEWS, Novak and others is truly disgusting. On a different thread I just learned that Ann Coulter of all people was paraded out on FOX last night to give her angle on Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson’s moral ability to judge Don Imus. We get Eliot Abhrams running trash-talk against Nance Pelosi. We get Dick Cheney hiding behind the shrubs while NonPres. Bush gives a speech that is full of hogwash. We get better, more substantive, news reporting out of the Daily Show than by any of the network or cable newscasts. We get charges of treason lobbed against leaders with policy differences as thinly disguised political debate. We get a daily dose of name calling and human denegration from far-right AM radio. And in all of this, we get jacked by insincere politicians and media personalities who have seemingly lost sight of their nation’s history and its unique place in the world, and instead have blinded themselves with a Vince Lambardi idea of competition – “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

    Too bad the hooligans running the show at this time have confused our nation’s democratic greatness with a sporting event. -Kevo

  • Now how are those cages a bad idea, firefall? The icecap melts, the cages sink, and the problem is solved. You want to grill them? I think we’ve put enough toxic waste into the atmosphere….

  • Why are we not surprised?

    Back in February of 2006, I reported on the Plame-gate prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s efforts to resist Scooter Libby’s demand for production of all the documents that Fitzgerald had reviewed, including highly classified documents. Scooter’s lawyers claim to need the documents to fight charges of perjury and lying to the FBI.

    A (New York) Daily News article at the time said, “Fitzgerald, who is fighting Libby’s request, said in a letter to Libby’s lawyers that many e-mails from Cheney’s office at the time of the Plame leak in 2003 have been deleted contrary to White House policy.”

    Read the post at Nixon blamed his secretary, Rosemary Woods. Who will Cheney blame?

    Visit the Schapira blog, “What we know so far …

    “… and tell ’em Big Mitch sent ya!”

  • This situation is not different than the rest of his fiacos. He just happens to have Congress who expect accountable for their breaking laws, no matter what size law. My bet, is the president will not change his total way of life, for anyone or reason.

    Regards,

    Quechick007

  • The facts are that Rove and White House does not want the emails found except by them. Remember a guy name North? The RNC&WH has access to the best people in the world! They can make people, like senators, CIA NOC agents discredited, die or just vanish. Neither you nor any one else will find the emails unless they (RNC/WH) wants you to recover or find them! Now go take on the day, in the world of smoke and mirrors.

    JXH101

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