Emails past and present

by digby

Somebody help me out here.  Who all is still in jail over this?  I can’t remember:

• The number of White House officials given RNC e-mail accounts is higher than previously disclosed. In March 2007, White House spokesperson Dana Perino said that only a “handful of officials” had RNC e-mail accounts. In later statements, her estimate rose to “50 over the course of the administration.” In fact, the Committee has learned from the RNC that at least 88 White House officials had RNC e-mail accounts. The officials with RNC e-mail accounts include Karl Rove, the President’s senior advisor; Andrew Card, the former White House Chief of Staff; Ken Mehlman, the former White House Director of Political Affairs; and many other officials in the Office of Political Affairs, the Office of Communications, and the Office of the Vice President.
• White House officials made extensive use of their RNC e-mail accounts. The RNC has preserved 140,216 e-mails sent or received by Karl Rove. Over half of these e-mails (75,374) were sent to or received from individuals using official “.gov” e-mail accounts. Other heavy users of RNC e-mail accounts include former White House Director of Political Affairs Sara Taylor (66,018 e-mails) and Deputy Director of Political Affairs Scott Jennings (35,198 e-mails). These e-mail accounts were used by White House officials for official purposes, such as communicating with federal agencies about federal appointments and policies.
• There has been extensive destruction of the e-mails of White House officials by the RNC. Of the 88 White House officials who received RNC e-mail accounts, the RNC has preserved no e-mails for 51 officials. In a deposition, Susan Ralston, Mr. Rove’s former executive assistant, testified that many of the White House officials for whom the RNC has no e-mail records were regular users of their RNC e-mail accounts. Although the RNC has preserved no e-mail records for Ken Mehlman, the former Director of Political Affairs, Ms. Ralston testified that Mr. Mehlman used his account “frequently, daily.” In addition, there are major gaps in the e-mail records of the 37 White House officials for whom the RNC did preserve e-mails. The RNC has preserved only 130 e-mails sent to Mr. Rove during President Bush’s first term and no e-mails sent by Mr. Rove prior to November 2003. For many other White House officials, the RNC has no e-mails from before the fall of 2006.
• There is evidence that the Office of White House Counsel under Alberto Gonzales may have known that White House officials were using RNC e-mail accounts for official business, but took no action to preserve these presidential records. In her deposition, Ms. Ralston testified that she searched Mr. Rove’s RNC e-mail account in response to an Enron-related investigation in 2001 and the investigation of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald later in the Administration. According to Ms. Ralston, the White House Counsel’s office knew about these e-mails because “all of the documents we collected were then turned over to the White House Counsel’s office.” There is no evidence, however, that White House Counsel Gonzales initiated any action to ensure the preservation of the e-mail records that were destroyed by the RNC.

Emptywheel has a nice timeline of the Bush administration email controversy, here. And that wasn’t all. Here’s the CNN story which has Fox commentator Dana Perino, then White House press secretary, admitting that millions of official emails might have been deleted:

Millions of White House e-mails may be missing, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino acknowledged Friday.

“I wouldn’t rule out that there were a potential 5 million e-mails lost,” Perino told reporters.

The administration was already facing sharp questions about whether top presidential advisers including Karl Rove improperly used Republican National Committee e-mail that the White House said later disappeared.

The latest comments were a response to a new report from a liberal watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), alleging that over a two-year period official White House e-mail traffic for hundreds of days has vanished — in possible violation of the federal Presidential Records Act. (Watch CREW’s comments on the missing messages Video)

“This story is really now a two-part issue,” CREW’s Melanie Sloan told CNN. “First there’s the use of the RNC e-mail server that’s inappropriate by White House officials and secondly we’ve also learned that there were between March of 2003 and October of 2005 apparently over 5 million e-mail that were not preserved and these are e-mail on the regular White House server.”

Perino stressed there’s no indication the e-mails were intentionally lost, but she was careful not to dispute the outside group’s allegations. “I’m not taking issue with their conclusions at this point,” Perino said. “We’re checking into them. There are 1,700 people in the Executive Office of the President.”

The Wikipedia entry about the Bush White House email matter is here. As far as I know, no emails were ever recovered and the matter was quietly dropped.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, yes,  the FBI is now looking at all of Clinton’s personal emails. And as Kevin Drum pointed out the other day, we’ll undoubtedly see all the juicy details, dribbled out with the most drama the new Spite Girls can drum up:

Today, the company that manages Hillary Clinton’s email server says that although her personal emails were deleted, the server was never “wiped.” Thus, it might still be possible to recover the deleted emails.

That’s it. That’s the news. But somehow the Washington Post managed to occupy three reporters and 1,500 words telling us this. You can skip most of it. Here’s the only part that matters:

On Saturday, Sens. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairmen of the Judiciary and Homeland Security committees, respectively, said they would push for the deleted e-mails to be reviewed if they can be recovered.

Gee, no kidding. I’m sure the nation’s security hinges on this. And if Hillary’s personal emails are successfully recovered, I’m equally sure that a few of the most embarrassing ones will somehow get leaked to friendly reporters.

Hillary Clinton is well aware of what happens when a Republican Congress starts investigating a prominent Democrat. That’s why she deleted her personal emails in the first place. The 2015 version of the GOP is apparently bent on proving that nothing has changed since the 90s.

Meanwhile, we will all ignore the fact that Jeb Bush did the exact same thing and nobody seems to care. Funny that.

When the Benghazi obsession first happened, some of us who have good antenna for GOP bullshit knew what it was all about.

The committee isn’t looking for evidence of Benghazi! or anything else like that. The press doesn’t really care about “transparency.” This is all about finding embarrassing personal information, for reasons only a psychiatrist can explain:

An email from Hillary Clinton to Huma Abedin: “Just knock on the door to the bedroom if it’s closed.” http://t.co/tB6jXCcW28

— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 25, 2015

And, by the way, that tweet is not some intern making a mistake. It’s the lede of the article:

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