1 Boring Old Man

Bush Aide Addresses Missing RNC E-Mails
^{At Senate Hearing, Jennings Is Silent on U.S. Attorneys’ Firings; Rove Is Absent}

A young White House political aide was grilled inconclusively by the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday about the firings of U.S. attorneys after Karl Rove, the president’s senior political adviser, failed to show up at the committee’s hearing in response to a subpoena.

J. Scott Jennings, 29, the deputy political director for the White House, refused to address the firings but tried to explain how thousands — or possibly millions — of White House e-mails to and from the political office were transmitted only through communications accounts controlled by the Republican National Committee.

That use of the RNC accounts put some of the political office’s messages outside the reach of the National Archives, which sought to preserve them under a federal law mandating eventual public access, and the reach of Democratic congressional investigators, who have sought to look at them for evidence of improper actions.

Jennings offered a stripped-down explanation: He wanted a White House-supplied BlackBerry and was told no, and so he got one from the RNC, as many other political affairs aides had done. "I was receiving a lot of e-mail on my official account. And I requested [a BlackBerry] at that moment, and I was told that it wasn’t the custom to give political affairs staffers those devices," Jennings said.