The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has been “investigating whether White House officials violated the Presidential Records Act by using e-mail accounts maintained by the Republican National Committee and the Bush Cheney ’04 campaign for official White House communications.” Today, House investigators released an interim staff report with a summary of the evidence the Committee has received to date.
I think the operative word here is “busted.”
* “The number of White House officials given RNC e-mail accounts is higher than previously disclosed.” The White House initially said only a “handful of officials” used private, unaccountable RNC email addresses. Then the Bush gang conceded that, over the course of the last six years, 50 officials used the accounts. The Oversight Committee has no found “at least 88 White House officials” who took advantage of RNC email, including Karl Rove, Andrew Card, Ken Mehlman, and “many other officials in the Office of Political Affairs, the Office of Communications, and the Office of the Vice President.”
* “White House officials made extensive use of their RNC e-mail accounts.” According to the emails preserved by the RNC, Rove used his private, unaccountable email address over 140,000 times. Sara Taylor had over 66,000 emails, while Scott Jennings had over 35,000 emails. “These e-mail accounts were used by White House officials for official purposes, such as communicating with federal agencies about federal appointments and policies.”
* “There has been extensive destruction of the e-mails of White House officials by the RNC.” On the one hand, the RNC didn’t preserve any emails for 51 of the 88 White House officials who used RNC email accounts, including Ken Mehlman, the former RNC chairman, who used his account for official WH business on a “daily” basis. On the other hand, for the accounts the RNC did preserve, there are large gaps. “The RNC has preserved only 130 e-mails sent to Mr. Rove during President Bush’s first term and no e-mails sent by Mr. Rove prior to November 2003. For many other White House officials, the RNC has no e-mails from before the fall of 2006.”
* Alberto Gonzales may have known about all of this. According to former Rove aide Susan Ralston, the White House Counsel’s office, then run by Gonzales, knew about Rove’s use of RNC emails. “There is no evidence, however, that White House Counsel Gonzales initiated any action to ensure the preservation of the e-mail records that were destroyed by the RNC.”
The House Oversight Committee investigators have several recommendations about how best to proceed.
First, the records of federal agencies should be examined to assess whether they may contain some of the White House e-mails that have been destroyed by the RNC. The Committee has already written to 25 federal agencies to inquire about the e-mail records they may have retained from White House officials who used RNC and Bush Cheney ’04 e-mail accounts. Preliminary responses from the agencies indicate that they may have preserved official communications that were destroyed by the RNC.
Second, the Committee should investigate what former White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales knew about the use of political e-mail accounts by White House officials. If Susan Ralston’s testimony to the Committee is accurate, there is evidence that Mr. Gonzales or counsels working in his office knew in 2001 that Karl Rove was using his RNC e-mail account to communicate about official business, but took no action to preserve Mr. Rove’s official communications.
Third, the Committee may need to issue compulsory process to obtain the cooperation of the Bush Cheney ’04 campaign. The campaign has informed the Committee that it provided e-mail accounts to 11 White House officials, but the campaign has unjustifiably refused to provide the Committee with basic information about these accounts, such as the identity of the White House officials and the number of e-mails that have been preserved.
The full report is online (.pdf). If this interim staff report is any indication, Waxman is just getting warmed up.