Missing Email Scandal

This is another vague, amorphous "scandal"... ish. But it has shocking ties right into the caging list scandal.

White House staff (and who knows who else) used the Republican National Committee email server to communicate about political machinations.

This is against the Hatch Act, which governs the political vs. public aspects of the White House. The more familiar aspect of the Act is to say that politicians aren't supposed to use their office, their official vehicle, or any other resources of the White House to do political business. For example, if Karl Rove wanted to find out the polling numbers for the GOP in Iowa, he couldn't use his WH email account for that. This keeps those in the administration from wasting government resources on their own re-elections.

But the other side of the Act also dictates that official business can't be done outside the office. While the flip side is about preserving resources, this side is about preserving all documentation about an Administration. Rove can't use his RNC account to discuss amendments to a bill, for example. Doing so would not only violate the Hatch Act, but also allow him to hide presidential records from the National Archives.

Hiding records by using an outside email account goes against the Presidential Records Act, which regulates how all the "paperwork" (in quotes because now it's virtual too, of course) generated by the Administration will be handled. Under the PRA, everything has to be saved until the National Archives says it's OK to throw it out (usually done during the sorting process for the Presidential Library, I suspect).

Which brings us to the next part of this story. When the Congressional committees who were holding hearings on various political machinations of the Administration, they found that when they subpoenaed all the records and emails, many, many were missing. Inquiries revealed that the WH officials and staff had been using the RNC server for both political and policy matters.

Yes, it is true that times have changed. Yes, it's true that not so long ago, no one had ever heard of email. Yes, it's true that those of us with multiple email accounts get confused too. However, emails that have been recovered show this was intentional:

Susan Ralston, who was Karl Rove’s executive assistant, invited two lobbyists working for Jack Abramoff to use her RNC e-mail account to avoid “security issues” with the White House e-mail system, writing: “I now have an RNC blackbeny which you can use to e-mail me at any time. No security issues like my WH email.” [ThinkProgress]

However, when Congress attempted to subpoena the emails from the RNC, they had been deleted. Four years worth of emails, approximately 5 million, were missing from the RNC servers. This is yet another assault on the PRA; had the emails been carefully preserved, the WH might have only gotten in trouble over the Hatch Act ("What were the emails doing on the RNC server in the first place?") but in this case, they have effectively destroyed administration records.

Or, are all the emails missing? At least 500 of these emails were victims of yet another mistake, this one for real: the sender typed in "rnc.com" instead of "rnc.org". (In fact much of what we know comes from similar mistakes in addressing.) Fortunately for history, "rnc.com" was a parody site that was owned by a friend of BBC reporter David Palast. As Palast describes in his book, Armed Madhouse, some of the incriminating emails Congress was looking for were in these 500, including the smoking gun of caging lists. Senator John Conyers is now investigating these emails.

UPDATE: While we can't get the MSM to pick up on this story, at least CNN today is finally mentioning that some emails are missing (altho it's buried in their politics page)...