What happened to Poppy’s missing emails?
by digby
Here’s a little nugget from Rick Perlstein in a piece about presidential libraries and the government rules about maintaining presidential papers for historical purposes:
Don Wilson, the national archivist appointed by Ronald Reagan (on the recommendation of Dick Cheney), was so bad that the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, which usually superintends the library system with about as much vigilance as the Intelligence Committee reins in the CIA, was forced in 1992 to conclude he had “failed to exercise care and diligence in fulfilling his responsibilities.”
So why in the world did George H.W. Bush name Wilson executive director of his library and foundation? Could it be because with only hours left in the Bush I term, Wilson signed a secret document granting Bush physical custody of the White House email backup tapes? (A federal judge would later strike this document down as “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and contrary to law,” but by then Wilson had already begun his new job.)
This is nothing compared to what his son did, of course, with the use of a private RNC email server and deletion of millions of official emails, but it shows that unless you’re Hillary Clinton you can do anything with emails that you like and nobody will think much about it.
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