Daniel Schulman: The Emails the White House Doesn't Want You to See
[Daniel Schulman is an Investigative Reporter at Mother Jones. ]
On February 6, 2003, lobbyist Jack Abramoff sent an email to his former executive assistant Susan Ralston, who had since gone on to work for Karl Rove, requesting that she pass along an important message to her boss. A Louisiana Indian tribe, the Jena band of Choctaws, was seeking to acquire land for a casino, a project at odds with the interests of Abramoff's tribal clients who feared it would siphon business from their own gaming establishments. Abramoff wanted Rove to intercede and "to get some quiet message from the WH [White House] that this is absurd." After Ralston agreed to pass along word, Abramoff replied to thank her. But he slipped up.
Instead of responding to an email account administered by the Republican National Committee sralston@georgewbush.com) as he had intended, he sent the message to Ralston's White House address. The following day Abramoff was alerted to his error by a colleague, Kevin Ring, who'd spoken to a White House official to whom Abramoff's request had been forwarded. "She said it is better to not put this stuff in writing in their email system because it might actually limit what they can do to help us, especially since there could be lawsuits, etc.," Ring wrote. Abramoff responded swiftly: "Dammit. It was sent to Susan on her rnc [Republican National Committee] pager and was not supposed to go into the WH system."
The significance of this intriguing exchange, which was among thousands of emails reviewed by investigators for the House Government Reform Committee as part of an extensive investigation into Abramoff, might have gone unrecognized had it not been for another scandal, this one involving the abrupt firings of eight U.S. Attorneys. As the controversy intensified in early March and hearings were held, the Department of Justice was forced to release thousands of documents, including email exchanges between Alberto Gonzales' chief of staff Kyle Sampson, who resigned in mid-March, and Rove deputy J. Scott Jennings.
Here too was evidence that White House officials were conducting business using RNC email accounts, domains such as gwb43.com and rnchq.org. But why? For one, as Abramoff was attempting to do, it is a way of bypassing the White House server and skirting its automatic archiving function, insuring that potentially damaging or incriminating emails will not be preserved for posterity by the National Archives, or worse, come to light through the efforts of a federal prosecutor or congressional investigator. In a March 15 letter to Henry Waxman's Government Reform Committee, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington noted that this practice might violate the 1978 Presidential Records Act, which governs how the papers of presidents and their staffs are to be preserved, and urged an investigation. "This refreshed our memory about what we'd seen in the Abramoff emails," says one Waxman aide.
A little over a week later, Waxman's Committee fired off its own letters to Mike Duncan, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and Marc Racicot, the former chair of the president's reelection committee, demanding that they preserve White House emails on their organization's servers "because of their potential relevance to congressional investigations"˜"multiple" investigations the letter stressed. "The e-mail exchanges reviewed by the Committee provide evidence that in some instances, White House officials were using the nongovernmental accounts specifically to avoid creating a record of the communications." (According to the Waxman aide, Duncan and Racicot have yet to respond.)
Steven Aftergood, the director of the Federation of American Scientists' project on government secrecy, says the use of RNC email accounts is interesting for another reason. "It shows how closely intertwined the White House is with its partisan allies," he says. "The fact that the White House and the RNC are working hand in hand and White House officials are using RNC emails is itself remarkable." He added, "Iran-Contra is getting invoked a lot these days and this may be another parallel, where the famous White House emails were recovered even after they were deleted from the White House server. People may have learned that lesson." ...
Read entire article at Mother Jones
On February 6, 2003, lobbyist Jack Abramoff sent an email to his former executive assistant Susan Ralston, who had since gone on to work for Karl Rove, requesting that she pass along an important message to her boss. A Louisiana Indian tribe, the Jena band of Choctaws, was seeking to acquire land for a casino, a project at odds with the interests of Abramoff's tribal clients who feared it would siphon business from their own gaming establishments. Abramoff wanted Rove to intercede and "to get some quiet message from the WH [White House] that this is absurd." After Ralston agreed to pass along word, Abramoff replied to thank her. But he slipped up.
Instead of responding to an email account administered by the Republican National Committee sralston@georgewbush.com) as he had intended, he sent the message to Ralston's White House address. The following day Abramoff was alerted to his error by a colleague, Kevin Ring, who'd spoken to a White House official to whom Abramoff's request had been forwarded. "She said it is better to not put this stuff in writing in their email system because it might actually limit what they can do to help us, especially since there could be lawsuits, etc.," Ring wrote. Abramoff responded swiftly: "Dammit. It was sent to Susan on her rnc [Republican National Committee] pager and was not supposed to go into the WH system."
The significance of this intriguing exchange, which was among thousands of emails reviewed by investigators for the House Government Reform Committee as part of an extensive investigation into Abramoff, might have gone unrecognized had it not been for another scandal, this one involving the abrupt firings of eight U.S. Attorneys. As the controversy intensified in early March and hearings were held, the Department of Justice was forced to release thousands of documents, including email exchanges between Alberto Gonzales' chief of staff Kyle Sampson, who resigned in mid-March, and Rove deputy J. Scott Jennings.
Here too was evidence that White House officials were conducting business using RNC email accounts, domains such as gwb43.com and rnchq.org. But why? For one, as Abramoff was attempting to do, it is a way of bypassing the White House server and skirting its automatic archiving function, insuring that potentially damaging or incriminating emails will not be preserved for posterity by the National Archives, or worse, come to light through the efforts of a federal prosecutor or congressional investigator. In a March 15 letter to Henry Waxman's Government Reform Committee, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington noted that this practice might violate the 1978 Presidential Records Act, which governs how the papers of presidents and their staffs are to be preserved, and urged an investigation. "This refreshed our memory about what we'd seen in the Abramoff emails," says one Waxman aide.
A little over a week later, Waxman's Committee fired off its own letters to Mike Duncan, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and Marc Racicot, the former chair of the president's reelection committee, demanding that they preserve White House emails on their organization's servers "because of their potential relevance to congressional investigations"˜"multiple" investigations the letter stressed. "The e-mail exchanges reviewed by the Committee provide evidence that in some instances, White House officials were using the nongovernmental accounts specifically to avoid creating a record of the communications." (According to the Waxman aide, Duncan and Racicot have yet to respond.)
Steven Aftergood, the director of the Federation of American Scientists' project on government secrecy, says the use of RNC email accounts is interesting for another reason. "It shows how closely intertwined the White House is with its partisan allies," he says. "The fact that the White House and the RNC are working hand in hand and White House officials are using RNC emails is itself remarkable." He added, "Iran-Contra is getting invoked a lot these days and this may be another parallel, where the famous White House emails were recovered even after they were deleted from the White House server. People may have learned that lesson." ...