L’État, c’est Goper

by digby

I figured they would do it, but it’s still hard to believe they’d go this far:

“As I stated in my earlier letter to the Republican National Committee today, the Judiciary Committee intends to obtain the relevant emails directly from the RNC,” Conyers said in reaction to the Fielding letter. “The White House position seems to be that executive privilege not only applies in the Oval Office, but to the RNC as well. There is absolutely no basis in law or fact for such a claim.”

We know that MC Rove and the Mayberry Machiavellis have been running the world as though it were a crooked race for a seat on the Dallas schoolboard, but the idea that executive privilege extends to the Republican National Committee seems a tad excessive even for them.

We shall see if all these strict constructionists on the federal bench agree.

Update: The NY Times writes:

It also exposed the dual electronic lives led by Mr. Rove and 21 other White House officials who maintain separate e-mail accounts for government business and work on political campaigns — and raised serious questions, in the eyes of Democrats, about whether political accounts were used to conduct official work without leaving a paper trail.

Is it really necessary to frame that as a partisan thing? It’s quite obviously legitimate to ask questions about this, whether Democrat or Republican:

The committee appears to have changed its e-mail retention policies twice, possibly in response to the investigation by a special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, into the leak of the name of a C.I.A. officer. When that inquiry began, in early 2004, the committee’s practice was to purge all e-mail from its servers after 30 days.

But in August of that year, according to the Republican official, the committee decided that e-mail sent by White House officials would be kept on the server. Still, the change did not prevent White House officials from manually deleting their e-mail, and some, including Mr. Rove, apparently did. So in 2005, the committee took steps to prevent Mr. Rove from doing so.

“Mr. Kelner did not provide many details about why this special policy was adopted for Mr. Rove,” Mr. Waxman wrote. “But he did indicate that one factor was the presence of investigative or discovery requests or other legal concerns.”

I know the press doesn’t think its job is to “raise questions” that some Democrat hasn’t put out in a press release, but this is ridiculous. This doesn’t look bad just in the eyes of those dastardly partisan Dems. Anyone with a functioning brain, including even writers and editors at the NY Times, can surely see that something looks fishy about Karl Rove systematically deleting all his emails and the RNC later making a special policy to prevent him from doing it.

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