Casual Lawbreaking at the White House
Dan Froomkin
New evidence unearthed by House Democrats establishes that White House political adviser Karl Rove and many of his colleagues used Republican National Committee e-mail accounts for official business — even though White House policy is clear that doing so is a violation of the Presidential Records Act.
How did such casual lawbreaking come to be so widespread? And why was it tolerated? Those are among the questions the White House has yet to answer satisfactorily.
Unlike the White House, whose e-mail retention rules essentially preserve everything forever, the RNC automatically deleted most e-mails after 30 days and allowed users to manually delete whatever they felt like. The result, as I first reported in April, is that countless White House e-mails are now missing.
And as the new House Oversight Committee report points out, the White House counsel’s office — then headed by current Attorney General Alberto Gonzales — was aware of these violations of e-mail policy, but chose to do nothing about it.
But in this case, there’s another reason. Recall that during the Plame Investigation, Karl Rove had denied having anything to do with being a source about Valerie Plame Wilson’s C.I.A. identity for Matt Cooper, then a correspondant for Time Magazine. Then Rove’s lawyer, Robert Luskin, had lunch with Time Magazine’s Viveka Novak, he told him that Rove was Cooper’s source. Not long thereafter, Rove showed up in Patrick Fitzgerald’s Grand Jury with an email to Steven Hadley that he said "reminded" him that he had talked to Cooper. Apparently, you can’t be charged with perjury to a Grand Jury if you come back and tell the truth. At the time, we were all outraged that Novak had spilled the beans [as was Time Magazine who fired her where she no longer works]. But at the time, the big question was "where did that email come from?" Rove’s emails had all been subpoenaed, and this email wasn’t among them.
Well, it came from Rove’s RNC email account. Now, all emails from before that episode have been deleted. So, the likely scenerio is that Rove realized that in producing that email, he was revealing the "other" path he had for communicating with his operatives, and he quickly moved to plug this window into his wheelings and dealings. He knew that this was a way to communicate "off the radar" and had been doing that from the start.
I certainly would like to see a numbers comparison on Rove’s RNC account vs. his WH account. I think it would be telling. After all, what are we the people paying him to do? Certainly the job he’s paid for only would involve WH e-mails, and I find it very plausible that he could not have had the numbers on his RNC account without using it on public time. We are not paying him to politicize, but it’s clear that he’s been doing a lot of that if we only take the numbers of e-mails written at face value.
I think you are dead on with your idea though. The RNC account was used for official business that he didn’t want on record. He’s a sneaky one.
He’s “premeditated” sneaky – that’s what needs to be proven in a court. I think the Cooper email is powerful evidence – since it was not turned in in response to Patrick Fitzgerald’s request, but was exhumed to exonerate him. The email to Hadley could hardly be called “political.”