I've added content - a second note, also over the fold, had some worthy references to share as well.
In light of the yammering, whining, squirming, and hand-waving of the GOP in their efforts to make a huge controversy over the HRC email scandal, I humbly submit: this morning, while looking for an old file, I stumbled across a text document titled "CREW_ExecSummaryAndFirstPara.txt" that contained information about the Presidential Records Act (PRA) and how the Clinton and Bush Administrations each addressed it.
It wasn't a long doc - it was a note for a diary that I never wrote.
Contents posted over the fold.
Presidential Records Act (PRA): Enacted in 1978, requires the president to preserve all presidential records, which are defined as those records relating to the "activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of [the president's] constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties..."
Clinton Administration Policy: In 1993, then-Assistant to the President and Staff Secretary John Podesta sent a memo to all presidential staff explaining that the PRA required all staff members to maintain all records, including emails. Podesta stated that the use of external email networks was prohibited because records would not be saved as required. The 1997 White House Manual and a 2000 memo issued by Mark Lindsay, then Assistant to the President for Management and Administration echoed this policy, requiring staff to use only the White House email system for official communications.
Bush Administration Policy: The Bush Administration has refused to make public its record-keeping policy. A confidential source provided CREW with a 2002 document indicating the use of "non-EOP messaging-enabled mechanisms should not be used for official business."
Bush Administration Practice: In the wake of the scandals surrounding Jack Abramoff and the fired U.S. Attorneys, emails were released showing that top White House staffers routinely used Republican National Committee (RNC) email accounts to conduct official business. For example, J. Scott Jennings, White House Deputy Political Director, used an RNC account to communicate with the former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales regarding the appointments of new U.S. Attorneys. Similarly, Susan Ralston, a former aide to Karl Rove, used RNC email accounts to communicate with Abramoff about appointments to the Department of the Interior.
PRA Violations: 1) The administration failed to implement adequate record-keeping systems to archive presidential email records; 2) two confidential sources independently informed CREW that the administration abandoned a plan to recover more than five million missing emails; 3) White House staff used outside email accounts to conduct presidential business, ensuring that emails were not adequately preserved. In fact, former Abramoff associate Kevin Ring said in an email to Abramoff that Ralston had told him not to send emails to her official White House account "because it might actually limit what they can do to help us, especially since there could be lawsuits, etc."
Hatch Act Excuse: The administration has claimed that Rove, Jennings and other staffers use RNC accounts to avoid violating the Hatch Act. This is untrue. The Hatch Act prohibits White House staff from using official resources for purely "political" purposes. "Political" refers to the president's role as either a candidate for office or as leader of his party. Email communications regarding presidential appointments for U.S. Attorney and Interior Department positions clearly fall within the PRA as making appointment is an official presidential function and does not relate to the president's role as party leader.
__________
"Recent revelations about the use by certain high-ranking White House officials of outside (i.e. non-governmental) email accounts suggest that the Bush administration has taken its policy of secrecy to a new level. Not content to simply prevent the public from examining the records of its administration, the White House now seems intent on ensuring that the historical record of this presidency is purged of evidence that might cast the administration in a less than favorable light. This practice is a direct violation of the Presidential Records Act ("PRA"), a statute enacted to establish public ownership and control of presidential records."
Source:
Without a Trace 04-12-07;
CREW Releases New Report - Without A Trace: The Missing White House Emails and the Violations of the Presidential Records Act
Well, looky here - I found another note, with more info & data. Contents excerpted in the blockquote below:
Infamous George H.W. Bush quote, via TruthOut(with video!):
GRETA: You are a letter writer. Tons of letters.
H.W. BUSH: Not anymore. Because now I use the email. And the computer. And I find that I don’t do near as much writing as I used to, letters as I used to. I don’t save them. And I am worried about that a little bit not that I have that much more to say, but I think it’s too bad in a way that email will detract from the historical record of presidents. I don’t think that the President Bush uses email.
BARBARA BUSH: He doesn’t.
H.W. BUSH: You worry about it. People are going to subpoena the email records and we are going to, you know, you’ve gotta prove that you were telling the truth and all this stuff.1 I mean, it’s gotten so adversarial that it’s ugly.
What a surprise.
But, wait! There's more in the same note:
Via The Carpetbagger Report, a great summary of the missing email scandal and Karl Rove's particularly curious role in it:
If the political establishment wasn’t suspicious before, it is now.
A lawyer for the Republican National Committee told congressional staff members yesterday that the RNC is missing at least four years’ worth of e-mail from White House senior adviser Karl Rove that is being sought as part of investigations into the Bush administration, according to the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
GOP officials took issue with Rep. Henry Waxman’s account of the briefing and said they still hope to find the e-mail as they conduct forensic work on their computer equipment. But they acknowledged that they took action to prevent Rove — and Rove alone among the two dozen or so White House officials with RNC accounts — from deleting his e-mails from the RNC server. Waxman (D-Calif.) said he was told the RNC made that move in 2005.
In a letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, Waxman said the RNC lawyer, Rob Kelner, also raised the possibility that Rove had personally deleted the missing e-mails, all dating back to before 2005. GOP officials said Kelner was merely speaking hypothetically about why e-mail might be missing for any staffer and not referring to Rove in particular.
Kelner’s perspective is of particular interest right now. As the LA Times noted, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and congressional investigators met with Kelner and RNC lawyers yesterday, leaving Waxman with the impression that Rove “might have deliberately deleted” sought after emails.
The piece goes on to note:
Leahy and Specter want to know more in the Senate, and Conyers wants to know more in the House. And then there’s the whole new “executive privilege” argument, which I’ll get to in the next post.
Just think — when the prosecutor purge scandal started heating up a couple of weeks ago, the question about email accounts was considered a tangent of questionable significance.
These aren't the only emails that went missing, however. From this piece on the website for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW),
Beyond Rove's missing emails, and others the White House believes may have been lost due to the RNC's email purging policy, it seems there is another trove of emails that are unaccounted for — millions of them, actually. The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reported (PDF) yesterday that, according to two sources, "in addition to the so-called political emails sent through private accounts, there are over five million emails sent on White House servers over a two-year period that are also missing." In 2005, according to CREW, the White House Office of Administration discovered a problem with its archiving system and, after looking further into the issue, realized “there were hundreds of days in which emails were missing for one or more of the EOP [Executive Office of the President] components subject to the PRA [Presidential Records Act].” Though a plan was drawn up to recover the missing emails, CREW says, no action was ever taken to retrieve the lost messages.
The CREW report's first paragraph after the Executive SummaryX provides a worthwhile surmisation of what is going on:
"Recent revelations about the use by certain high-ranking White House officials of outside (i.e. non-governmental) email accounts suggest that the Bush administration has taken its policy of secrecy to a new level. Not content to simply prevent the public from examining the records of its administration, the White House now seems intent on ensuring that the historical record of this presidency is purged of evidence that might cast the administration in a less than favorable light. This practice is a direct violation of the Presidental Records Act ("PRA"), a statute enacted to establish public ownership and control of presidential records."
Now, of course, we learn (via Raw Story) that Henry Waxman has pulled the justification for the claim of "executive privilege" out from under them:
"I hereby rule that those claims are not legally valid to excuse current and former White House employees from appearing, testifying and producing documents related to this investigation," wrote Leahy, D-Vt.
[...snip...]
The executive privilege claim "is surprising in light of the significant and uncontroverted evidence that the president had no involvement in these firings," Leahy wrote in his ruling. "The president's lack of involvement in these firings — by his own account and that of many others — calls into question any claim of executive privilege."
Amazing how this seems to tie in the Unitary Executive hoopla, the attorney firings, the violations of the Hatch Act & PRA, and the scandalously "lost" - and apparently intentionally purged - email records.
I just thought y'all might find that to be a significant, relevant, and timely reminder.
Carry on.
Footnotes
1 Emphasis mine.