Last week, as congressional demands for White House emails sent using Republican National Committee addresses intensified, there was plenty of talk about “cooperation.” Everyone said they wanted to find the “lost” emails, and everyone agreed that some of the correspondence was directly relevant to the ongoing purge investigation. The RNC would recover as much as they could, and hopefully, the information would help answer pertinent questions.
That was last week. This week, the White House wants to “review” recovered emails, before anyone else sees them, to make sure … well, it’s not exactly clear what the argument is.
President Bush’s lawyers told the Republican National Committee on Tuesday not to turn over to Congress any e-mails related to the firings last year of eight U.S. attorneys before showing them to the White House.
Democrats and Republican critics of the administration said the move suggests that the White House is seeking to develop a strategy to block the release of the non-government e-mails to congressional investigators by arguing that they’re covered by executive privilege and not subject to review.
Scott M. Stanzel, deputy White House press secretary, called the action “reasonable” and said that any review of the e-mails would “be conducted in a timely fashion, to balance the committee’s need for the information with the extreme over breadth of their requests.” Party officials declined comment, but a GOP aide familiar with the negotiations said the RNC would comply with the White House request.
It’s an odd argument. “We want to be cooperative,” the White House seems to be saying, “but we want to see how incriminating the evidence is before deciding how cooperative we should be.”
House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) expected this to happen and specifically warned the RNC last week not to send the emails through White House gatekeepers, saying that it would be “an unjustified delay” and “potentially… an obstruction of our investigation.”
Conyers added yesterday, “The White House’s position to clear all RNC emails before they can respond to our request is extreme and unnecessary. This is a clear attempt, on the Administration’s part, to delay this process and keep the wheels of Justice turning slowly.”
If there’s a more blatant attempt to cover up the truth, I can’t think of it. This is comparable to the police showing up at your door with a search warrant, and asking them to wait outside for a couple of hours while you destroy evidence tidy up.
This is largely the same thing. White House officials broke the law by using RNC accounts for official business, then deleted them. The RNC can recover the docs, but the White House wants some time with them to see which emails need to be shredded excluded from any future document dumps.
The executive privilege claim, which was ridiculous last week, hasn’t improved any.
Bruce Fein, a former Reagan administration Justice Department official who’s been critical of the administration and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, said the existence of the RNC e-mails is worrisome for the White House.
“The situation is very awkward for the administration because they don’t know exactly what e-mails are there. What does seem very clear is that the e-mails did concern government business, which would include firing U.S. attorneys. Otherwise there would be no plausible claim,” he said.
Fein said the administration might be considering seeking an injunction to prevent the Republican Party from releasing the e-mails to Congress.
Citing the leaking of the Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers as an example, Fein said, “It’s always more difficult to claim privilege after it’s leaked out of your hands — or if it’s never in your hands in the first place.”
At the same time, Fein said, the White House is putting the Republican Party in a bind. “If you’re the RNC, you’re making yourself vulnerable to a claim you’re impeding or endeavoring to impede a congressional investigation,” he said.
Stay tuned.