While reviewing the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, members of Congress were particularly interested in Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff’s emails. When and how was he notified about the storm and the subsequent crisis?<\/p>\n
Lawmakers, however, never got to see the documents. It wasn’t because they were kept hidden — it’s because they didn’t exist<\/a>.<\/p>\n The White House refused to turn over high-level documentation, asserting that communications between President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and their aides were covered by executive privilege.<\/p>\n When it came to documentation of how Secretaries Michael Chertoff and Donald Rumsfeld responded to Katrina, however, congressional investigators got a different answer from the administration. The House committee established to investigate Katrina was “informed that neither Secretary Chertoff nor Secretary Rumsfeld use e-mail,” reported Reps. Charlie Melancon and William Jefferson, two Louisiana Democrats….<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Think Progress noted<\/a> today that Chertoff admitted recently that he was “constantly struggling to get an accurate picture of what the circumstances were in New Orleans,” in part because of a “lack of communications equipment<\/a>.” This week, however, Chertoff told lawmakers<\/a> that his agency is “acquiring more satellite equipment and more communications equipment to be able to deploy to our state and local emergency operators so they can communicate with us.”<\/p>\n That sounds great, just as long as they don’t expect an email reply email from their boss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While reviewing the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, members of Congress were particularly interested in Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff’s emails. When and how was he notified about the storm and the subsequent crisis? Lawmakers, however, never got to see the documents. It wasn’t because they were kept hidden — it’s because they didn’t exist. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6640\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}