White House may have lost key e-mails
WASHINGTON – The White House said Wednesday that it might 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, an admission that stirred anger and dismay among congressional investigators.
The e-mails were considered potentially critical evidence in congressional inquiries launched by Democrats into the role partisan politics might have played in such policy decisions as the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.
The White House said an effort was under way to see whether the messages could be recovered from the computer system, which was operated and paid for by the Republican National Committee as part of an avowed effort to separate political communications from those dealing with official business.
“The White House has not done a good enough job overseeing staff using political e-mail accounts to assure compliance with the Presidential Records Act,” White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said in an unusual late-afternoon teleconference with reporters. As a result, Stanzel said, “We may not have preserved all e-mails that deal with White House business.”
He refused to estimate how many e-mails might have been lost, but the system was used by dozens of officials over a period of more than six years.
“This is a remarkable admission that raises serious legal and security issues,” said Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is investigating the role of electoral politics in administration policy-making. “The White House has an obligation to disclose all the information it has.”
The missing e-mails not only add to the growing legal and public relations woes for the White House and Rove’s political operation, but also to the problems of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Gonzales, under fire for the handling of the U.S. attorney firings, was serving as White House counsel at the time the RNC’s parallel communications system was set up.
His office had at least partial responsibility for establishing ground rules for using the system.
The White House briefing Wednesday occurred just hours after the staff of Waxman’s committee and staff of the House Judiciary Committee met with White House officials to discuss the e-mails.
The White House has informed congressional investigators that it will not be able to meet a committee-set deadline of this Friday to turn over the communications.
The House aides are expected to meet with the RNC legal staff Thursday. A spokesman for the RNC said the GOP hopes to cooperate as much as possible but provided no further details.
The e-mails were sent through a communications system created in conjunction with the RNC early in the Bush administration. Rove and others were given special laptop computers and other communications devices to use instead of the government communications system when dealing with political matters.
The parallel system was designed to avoid running afoul of the Hatch Act, which prohibits using government resources for partisan purposes, White House officials have said.
But evidence has emerged that system users sometimes failed to maintain such separation and used the private system when communicating about government business.