This White House disclosure relates to both the firings of the US Attorneys and the alleged Hatch Act violation at the GSA:
The RNC Servers purge e-mails more than 30 days old? Even if that's true, these messages cannot be permanently lost.
Chairman Waxman, you know what to do. Nail down the RNCs IT guys (or their outsourced IT service providers) and get to the bottom of this, pronto. Those e-mails cannot be "lost."
From the Washington Post
Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which is investigating the use of outside accounts, issued a statement saying that the White House disclosure is "a remarkable admission that raises serious legal and security issues," adding: "The White House has an obligation to disclose all the information it has."
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Update, 12:19 EDT
Patrick Leahy is calling the White House on its bullshit. He is going to do exactly what I suggested in an earlier post:
"You can't erase e-mails, not today. They've gone through too many servers," said Leahy, D-Vt. "Those e-mails are there, they just don't want to produce them. We'll subpoena them if necessary."
"It's like the famous 18-minute gap in the Nixon White House tapes. They're there."
I suddenly had a flashback of Donald Rumsfeld telling the press that, "We know where the weapons of mass destruction are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." But I think something will be found this time.
If the NSA can retrieve your e-mails or my e-mails, then you can be damn sure Congress can go back and retrieve all the gwb43.com e-mails that have been sent and received during the last two years. There are at least two scandals with trails through that domain.
And are the White House staffers so fucking stupid that they think using a non-Federal e-mail account is going to hide their digital trail? Next time, use walkie talkies, landlines, or smoke signals, or meet in a parking garage or movie theater for your orders (and whatever else you give each other). Dear Fucking God, these people are so incompetent they can't even get scandal-related communications right. Ollie North should have been a lesson that in running covert operations at home or abroad, you must never use electronic mail of any kind.
OK, I'm being harsh. I'm glad they used e-mail or else we wouldn't be able to push these investigations forward. And the SEC could tell us all about the many Wall Street analysts who openly admitted that their equities research articles were bullshit, in writing, on their company's Exchange servers. So the Private Sector has far more incompetence and wrongdoing. I'm not losing sight of that.
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Update, 15:05 EDT
Holy Fuck. Maybe I was right to be harsh. The White House has been deliberately violating the Presidential Records Act since for at least four years. And has 'lost' over 5 million e-mails from the whitehouse.gov domain. Refer to my profanity above. Not only is the White House staff stupid, but they are criminals. Every fucking one of them.