This RNC email story seems to be rapidly picking up speed. TPMMuckraker has a big one just in.
Back in 2004, thanks to Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the Plame affair, the White House was ordered to come into compliance with the Presidential Records Act. Fitzgerald found out that many, including Karl Rove, had been using RNC servers to send and receive email. The RNC was ordered to institute immediately a new set of procedures that would ensure all future emails were properly stored and preserved.
But get this... despite the new policy, one which Karl Rove was no doubt specifically aware, Rove continued to delete his emails from the server through most of 2005. Eventually, the RNC noticed, forcing them to institute a special policy for Rove himself.
Says who? Says RNC counsel Rob Kelner.
Or to put it another way: the lawyer for the Republican Party just admitted that even the party didn't trust Karl Rove to come into compliance with federal law, so they instituted a policy designed specifically to protect them from his behavior.
Rove may think he deleted the emails from "the server." But unless the IT Department for the Republican Party is run by a bunch of ignorant monkeys, my guess is that they've got everything backed up to tape both on-site and off.
This is the point at which the interests of the Republican Party begin to radically diverge from the interests of the Bush administration. God only knows where this one will lead....
UPDATE: Well what do you know. First CREW reports millions of emails may be missing. Then the Senate Judiciary Committee reports that the DoJ will be releasing 1000s more pages of emails.
You know things are going poorly when you are releasing documents in an attempt to bury other news.
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