Where’d Karl’s emails go?

April 13, 2007

So, where are we with Karl Rove’s “lost” emails? Let’s turn to Dan Froomkin for a quick overview.

From 2001 to 2004, the RNC’s highly unusual “document retention” policy was to intentionally destroy all e-mails that were more than 30 days old. In the summer of 2004, due to “unspecified legal inquiries,” the RNC changed its policy by allowing — but not mandating — the indefinite retention of e-mails sent and received by White House staffers on their RNC accounts. That was just around the time special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s investigation of White House involvement in the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity was kicking into high gear.

Then, in 2005, when RNC officials discovered that all of Rove’s RNC e-mails were still getting deleted, presumably by Rove himself, they blocked his ability — and his ability alone — to do that. Other White House staffers could still delete at will, just not Rove.

Today, Rove’s lawyer added to the story by arguing that Rove didn’t intentionally delete his emails from the RNC server.

Karl Rove’s lawyer on Friday dismissed the notion that President Bush’s chief political adviser intentionally deleted his own e-mails from a Republican-sponsored server, saying Rove believed the communications were being preserved in accordance with the law. […]

“His understanding starting very, very early in the administration was that those e-mails were being archived,” Rove’s attorney, Robert Luskin, said.

And why on earth would he believe that?

Indeed, Rove’s understanding, “starting very, very early in the administration,” should have been the exact opposite. Why? Because he was given a copy of the White House policy, which tells staffers to comply with the law (the Presidential Records Act).

“Federal law requires the preservation of electronic communications sent or received by White House staff,” says the handbook that all staffers are given and expected to read and comply with.

“As a result, personnel working on behalf of the EOP [Executive Office of the President] are expected to only use government-provided e-mail services for all official communication.”

The handbook further explains: “The official EOP e-mail system is designed to automatically comply with records management requirements.”

And if that wasn’t clear enough, the handbook notes — as was the case in the Clinton administration — that “commercial or free e-mail sites and chat rooms are blocked from the EOP network to help staff members ensure compliance and to prevent the circumvention of the records management requirements.”

At what point, exactly, did Rove see this and think, “I can keep using a private email account outside the White House for official business and it’ll work out fine”? Is the White House really prepared to argue that Rove has the reading comprehension of a second grader and got confused when he saw “only use government-provided e-mail services for all official communication”?

The RNC doesn’t know where Rove’s emails are; the White House doesn’t know; and Rove’s lawyer doesn’t know (though he’s certain his client didn’t intentionally delete anything). And Rove’s argument is that he was sure the private emails he wasn’t supposed to be sending were being archived, even when they weren’t, and even after his emails were given special treatment due to an ongoing White House criminal investigation.

Got all that? Nothing suspicious here at all; move along, move along.

This really is their “18-minute gap” and it’s going to bite them like Nixon got bit.

There is a rul called “spoliation of evidence” where, when one party’s tales of why they lost important evidence just doesn’t cut it, that a judge can tell the jury that they can assume that, had the evidence been found and produced, it would be “adverse” to that party in the case.

I think the American people who are now the jury looking at Georgie and his antics, may adopt that rule whether they know it exists or not.

  • It would be fortunate indeed if Karl “snake in the grass” Rove really was a retard who made an innocent mistake because he’s missing a serious chunk of his attic insulation. That being demonstrably not the case, he’s likely swapping out his hard drives and cooking up a cover story. Congress is waiting too long on this one, and the stately minuet of motion and counter-motion is granting Rove too much time.

  • Okay, wait a minute.

    I’m a sysadmin for a software company and I help run the mail systems. What kind of bloody nonsense is going here — users don’t have access to delete emails from the server. There are backups, duplication, safeguards to prevent data loss and I can’t believe that the sysadmins at the RNC are so careless as to not have this stuff.

    Fer cryin’ out loud, our backup tapes are taken off-site in a locked box and I have to sign the list before they leave. There is a either a criminal negligence on the part of the network admins or this is just nonsense that is getting spewed to muddy the water. Either way, the emails aren’t “gone” most likely, it’s just that nobody wants to find them.

  • Rove swapping his hard drive won’t eliminate the old emails. If they really want to expunge them it’ll take a large affirmative effort involving not only wiping all the server media, but also finding and wiping (not just deleting, wiping) all copies of the emails from the drives/servers/backups of everyone who received them. Reconstructing the deleted emails could be time-consuming and difficult, but it could be done with sufficient effort. Oh, also, the efforts to wipe the data would be quite obvious, and would in themselves constitute actionable obstruction.

    Which is why they’re now putting out this ridiculous notion that executive privilege covers stuff on the RNC servers. They really got nothin’.

  • Where’d Karl’s emails go?

    I suggest Congress look in Katie Couric’s panties.

    Apologies in advance.

  • Okay, I’m a little confused. Why did the RNC block Rove from deleting his emails? Wouldn’t they WANT his emails erased?

  • Please don’t misconstrue this as a defense of what appears to be an obviously intentional loss of e-mails…

    I keep seeing Document Retention Policy in quotes which seems to imply that there’s some irony in using the word “retention” for a policy that “destroys” e-mail messages. I won’t deny that the irony is there and that it’s fun to pay notice to it. However, a Document Retention Policy is IT-speak. How long do you retain documents? Thirty days. Calling it what it is, a document retention policy, is not a smoking gun or a bad choice of words. It’s just a policy that describes how long e-mails (or other documents) are retained.

  • “New documents released Friday by the Justice Department may shed additional light, but their release prompted Gonzales’ one-time chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, to postpone a closed-door interview with congressional investigators.”

    Wow, that makes him look a lot more innocent!

    LOL!

  • What was stopping Rove (or the RNC) from using someone else’s RNC email account?
    How would we ever know?

    Subpoena all of the RNC’s servers NOW and let the forensic team at ’em.

  • In addition to what those who know better than I say about the e-mails being preserved on servers, Rove only can delete the e-mails that he sent or received. Those who received e-mails from him or those who sent them to him would still have them on their computers unless they, too, had deleted the e-mails. But so far, we’re hearing that only Rove deleted them. So either they are out there, just not necessarily in one place, or there has been a massive conspiracy to elminate them.

  • I suggest Congress look in Katie Couric’s panties.

    [No apologies could possibly make up for what I’m about to write.]

    Nah, security is a joke. Too many people have access. Flush Limbaugh’s capacious drawers were rejected for the same reason.

    [I still won’t apologize but I also won’t say where the e-mails are really being kept.]

  • This is in reply to Phoebe at #6

    My guess as to why the RNC took affirmative steps to save Rove’s email in 2005 was that a system admin(s) realized that if they did not they would be looking at highly probable obstruction of justice charges by acts of commission as they were told Rove was a problem by a prosecutor so the oopsie, I’m incompetent at my job defense wrt obstruction of justice charges by omission would have been thrown out the door. I imagine that if I was a juror, I would have a harder time convicting on acts of potentially accidental omission than on clear acts of commission.

    I am not a lawyer, I am not a sys-admin, I am just guessing that if an RNC tech geek explained their archiving policy to a political boss, the politico boss’s eyes would glaze over while the techie’s ass gets a decent degree of criminal protection. again, a pure guess on my part.

  • We are talking about an organized group of people who have been systematically raping the treasury of the Republic for over 6 years now—so it wouldn’t have taken much of that ill-gotten gain to simply replace each and every component of the system, from the individual laptops and right up to the main servers themselves.

    And if I recall correctly, the NSA was crying for funds not too long ago to replace their “inadequate” servers that were “overloading from too much stuff.”

  • “The RNC doesn’t know where Rove’s emails are; the White House doesn’t know; and Rove’s lawyer doesn’t know (though he’s certain his client didn’t intentionally delete anything). And Rove’s argument is that he was sure the private emails he wasn’t supposed to be sending were being archived, even when they weren’t, and even after his emails were given special treatment due to an ongoing White House criminal investigation.”

    Gee, archiving from 2005? I seem to remember a little investigation by some fellow named Fitzgerald about the same time. Hmmmmm…

  • Hey ‘yam’ @ post #3

    Thanks for the clarification of the process. Would you mind sending a message to the Senators in charge of the hearings, so they may see the urgency to proceed with obtaining the servers in question.

    We’d assume that they already know this, but then again, who knows…..

  • While Yam’s assertion of the process may be correct in organizations who are planning to maintain information, that obviously isn’t the case with the the EOP or the RNC.

    Backup tapes are intended for the purpose of RESTORING systems that have crashed, etc or where “accidental destruction” has taken place; they are retained for a specified period, then either overwriten or erased. They are not intended for off-line storage or “archiving” data (a term routinely misued by IT/IS staffers).

    Depending on how the system is configured, in many POP environments, the messages are deleted from the server (by design) once the user retrieves them and they’re stored locally.

    For appropriate disaster prevention and business continuity reasons, backup tapes SHOULD be taken (encrypted and in locked boxes)and stored off site at a location of not less than 40 miles in radius from the primary operating location, but many organiztions don’t take this practice as seriously as they should.

    Larry

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