1 Boring Old Man

Well, I Guess GWB43.com Really Is the Smoking Gunch

 

We just need to figure out how to get our geeks into the servers to prove it.

 

Bush aides’ use of GOP e-mail probed

The White House said Wednesday it had mishandled Republican Party-sponsored e-mail accounts used by nearly two dozen presidential aides, resulting in the loss of an undetermined number of e-mails concerning official White House business.

 

Though honestly, this feels like a trial balloon to me. I think they’re just trying this to see what kind of response they get.

…

So I’m not sure this is their final story. But for now, nothing could make them look more like bozos.

Here’s some thoughts about why I doubt this is the final word. This article is a long article peddling the story–which has been peddled already to the LAT and WaPo–about e-mails intended for the use of political business. The "we want to avoid Gore’s illegal calls" bs.

…Something’s not right–it’s as if they’ve got half the incriminating emails destroyed, but are doubtful they’ve destroyed everything, so they’re telling this story in hopes of buying time.

Now, perhaps this is just a stalling tactic, to stave off the time they tell use they’ve lost everything from Karl Rove for the last 3 years. But something is weird about the manner of this announcement.

But this time, a rat’s the only possible thing to smell. Congress has a perfectly legitimate reason to ask for the emails from these non-government servers. They have an ongoing investigation. They have solid evidence that these servers were used for communications that are pertinent to their investigation. There’s a clear law about the preservation of a paper trail for the Executive Branch. These servers can’t possibly be covered by Executive Priviledge.

So now the Administration/RNC is stalling, bargaining, obfuscating, etc. No big surprise. Either they’ve got the emails [damning], or they’ve partially destroyed the emails [also damning], or they’ve destroyed them all [damned damning]. There’s really no way to spin their way out of this without taking a big hit. So they are taking whichever of these three options is true and brainstorming how to play it to make it look innocent – which is really impossible. They’re going to have to play it to minimize the damage – barely possible.

My guess is that Monica Goodling and Kyle Sampson were just the first rats to jump ship. Were I a betting man, I’d bet that Karl Rove’s emails have been destroyed, and they’re working on making him blameless for their destruction. But another possibility is that this came up too fast for them to react safely without shades of Ollie North and Fawn  Hall shredding as fast as they could in the Iran-Contra days. They may be stuck with trying to keep them in hiding – shades of Nixon’s White House Tapes. But I’ll bet the gap is a lot longer than 18 minutes [Rosemary Woods] or 18 days [DOJ emails].

So, Marcy smells a rat. I smell a rat. And it’s because there’s a big old rat in these stories. A big old two-legged rat…