E-mail records are missing for 51 of the 88 White House officials who had electronic message accounts with the Republican National Committee, the House Oversight Committee said Monday.
The Bush administration may have committed “extensive” violations of a law requiring that certain records be preserved, the committee chairman, Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, said.
An interim report from the panel said the number of White House officials who had accounts at the Republican group and the number of messages sent and received were more extensive than had been thought. The White House said about 50 officials had accounts in President Bush’s tenure. The House panel found at least 88.
The Republican group has preserved messages by some of the heaviest users, including 140,216 sent or received by Karl Rove, the top political adviser in the White House.
The report said “the R.N.C. has preserved no e-mails for 51 officials,” including Ken Mehlman, a former White House political director who reportedly used his account frequently.
“Given the heavy reliance by White House officials on R.N.C. e-mail accounts, the high rank of the White House officials involved and the large quantity of missing e-mails,” the report said, “the potential violation of the Presidential Records Act may be extensive.”
The Presidential Records Act was enacted in 1978 to ensure that White House records are preserved and made available to the public and historians. The Act establishes that the records of a president, his immediate staff, and certain units of the Executive Office of the President belong to the United States, not to the individual president or his staff. The law provides:
The Bush Administration has until now been pretty smart about keeping all the dirty tricks from the public. I only wish that they would have been as smart running the gov’t for the good of the country as they were at being so bad for Democracy with their dishonesty and lies. I remember reading an article in the Washington Post Sunday editon Sep. 17 2006 by staff writer Rajiv Chandrasikaran titled ” Ties to GOP Tumped Know-How Among Staff to Rebuild Iraq”. According to the article Jim O’Biern (columnist of the Nation Review Kate O’Biern is Jim’s wife) worked for the Pentagon where he and his staff screened political appointees for defense posts in Iraq. Many of those chosen to work for the CPA Coalition Provisional Authority whick ran the Iraq gov’t from April 2003 to June 2004 lacked skills. ” The decision to send loyal Republicans and the willing instead of the best and the brightest to rebuild Iraq was regarded as the Bush Administrations gravest errors”. This is all so familar to us with Gonzales giving two lightweights in experience like Sampson and Goodling the power to hire and fire and giving partisans some much power in the Bush Administration. Bush and all his cronies should be held accountable. IMPEACH
Well said, Joy.
And while I don’t ascribe to a lot of what Ayn Rand represented I do have to wonder “where is OUR John Galt?” We need one.
IMPEACH!!!