Late last night we got word that the White House was claiming that many of the emails sent by White House staffers on non whitehouse.gov email addresses had been "lost." Given the history of this administration, it wasn't surprising that they try to claim something like this. But I must say, I did think they would do better than this:
...what you're talking about is the user's ability, if they are sitting at their laptop, and decide that, 'gosh, I've got a hundred emails here that I just -- are cluttering up my inbox, I want to put them in the deleted file, and I right-click the deleted items to empty my deleted file.' It's possible, possible, that those records could have been lost....
Click through to see the full explanation in all of its glory. It really is a thing of beauty. But look quickly, because the explanation isn't going to last long. In fact, it looks like it has already expired.
Of course the data is going to be recoverable. Computer forensic experts can get data off of hard drives that have been smashed into bits and burned in a fire. Karl Rove pressing delete twice isn't going to present much of a problem here. And although the White House may not have figured that out quite yet, the Senate has.
A U.S. congressional panel investigating the firing of federal prosecutors authorized subpoenas on Thursday for e-mails the White House has declared may be missing.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., challenged the White House assertion, saying, "It's not a question of e-mails being lost, it's e-mails they don't want to retrieve."The White House disclosed on Wednesday some of its staffers, including President George W. Bush's senior political adviser, Karl Rove, and several of his deputies, wrote e-mail messages on official business on Republican Party accounts, and some may have been wrongly deleted.
On a voice vote, the Judiciary Committee authorized subpoenas for these and other White House documents as well as for records it has sought from the Justice Department.
The panel also authorized subpoenas for Associate Deputy Attorney General William Moschella, and Scott Jennings, an aide to Rove, permitting Leahy to sign subpoenas compelling the Bush administration to surrender hundreds of new documents and force Moschella and Jennings to reveal their roles in the firings.
The votes authorize subpoenas to be issued if the administration records are not turned over and if Moschella and Jennings decline to appear before the panel.
For those who prefer to watch rather than read, Josh Marshall has a great excerpt of Sen. Leahy today on the floor of the Senate:
He may not have used the word "liar," but I'm not really sure he needed to.
One final point worth noting. As you consider the administration's defense on this one - the Hatch Act made me do it! - keep in mind the question of executive privilege. If their defense is that they used an outside system to be doubly sure they were not violating Hatch, they are by definition admitting that the material in the email was not in any way related to the president's executive authority. Today's claims that the emails were only political in nature cannot turn into tomorrow's claims that they are protected by executive privilege. They've made their choice, and now they will have to live with it.
Too clever by half. Too clever by half...
UPDATE: Dan Froomkin takes this whole issue on in detail today. For those looking to catch up, this is a great place to start.
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