Blackberry Machiavelli

by digby

Oh Goody. Donald Robert Luskin is spinning like a top for Rove again:

Karl Rove’s lawyer on Friday dismissed the notion that President Bush’s chief political adviser intentionally deleted his own e-mails from a Republican-sponsored computer system.

The attorney said Rove believed the communications were being preserved in accordance with the law.

The issue arose because the White House and Republican National Committee have said they may have lost e-mails from Rove and other administration officials. Democratically chaired congressional committees want those e-mails for their probe of the firings of eight federal prosecutors.

“His understanding starting very, very early in the administration was that those e-mails were being archived,” Rove’s attorney, Robert Luskin, said.

The prosecutor probing the Valerie Plame spy case saw and copied all of Rove’s e-mails from his various accounts after searching Rove’s laptop, his home computer, and the handheld computer devices he used for both the White House and Republican National Committee, Luskin said.

The prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, subpoenaed the e-mails from the White House, the RNC and Bush’s re-election campaign, he added.

“There’s never been any suggestion that Fitzgerald had anything less than a complete record,” Luskin said.

Any e-mails Rove deleted were the type of routine deletions people make to keep their inboxes orderly, Luskin said. He said Rove had no idea the e-mails were being deleted from the server, a central computer that managed the e-mail.

There’s no word on why that apparent lunatic from the RNC claimed that they had to take special precautions to keep Rove from deleting his messages.

It’s all very odd. I’ll be looking forward to reading Jane’s take on this. Luskin is her beat and she can read his spin better than anyone. (“There’s never been any suggestion….”)

Stay tuned. This is getting good.

Oh, and on another note, it looks like Gonzales may have cooked his goose. And the DOJ didn’t even bother to clumsily redact it as they usually do.

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