GOP Halts Effort to Retrieve White House E-Mails

Theresa Payton, White House Office of Administration chief information officer, and Allen Weinstein, United States archivist, testify on Capitol Hill. (By Manuel Balce Ceneta -- Associated Press)

The Washington Post reports:

After promising last year to search its computers for tens of thousands of e-mails sent by White House officials, the Republican National Committee has informed a House committee that it no longer plans to retrieve the communications by restoring computer backup tapes, the panel's chairman said yesterday.

The move increases the likelihood that an untold number of RNC e-mails dealing with official White House business during the first term of the Bush administration -- including many sent or received by former presidential adviser Karl Rove -- will never be recovered, said House Democrats and public records advocates.

The RNC had previously told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that it was attempting to restore e-mails from 2001 to 2003, when the RNC had a policy of purging all e-mails, including those to and from White House officials, after 30 days. But Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) disclosed during a hearing yesterday that the RNC has now said it "has no intention of trying to restore the missing White House e-mails."

"The result is a potentially enormous gap in the historical record," Waxman said, including the buildup to the Iraq war.

Spokesman Danny Diaz said in a statement that the RNC "is fully compliant with the spirit and letter of the law." He declined further comment.

Administration officials have acknowledged that Rove and many other White House officials routinely used RNC accounts for government business, despite rules requiring that they conduct such business through official communications channels. The RNC deleted all e-mails until 2004, when it exempted White House officials from its e-mail purging policy.

About 80 White House aides used RNC accounts for official government business, committee staff members said. Rove, for example, sent or received 140,000 e-mails on RNC servers from 2002 to 2007, and more than half involved official ".gov" accounts, the panel has said.

The RNC dispute is part of a broader debate over whether the Bush administration has complied with long-standing statutory requirements to preserve official White House records -- including those reflecting potentially sensitive policy discussions -- for history and in case of future legal demands.

The committee is investigating allegations that vast stores of official Bush administration e-mails have also gone missing from the White House, which scrapped a Clinton-era archiving system and has struggled with data retention problems.

A former White House technology manager told the committee in statements released yesterday that the Bush administration's e-mail system "was primitive and the risk that data would be lost was high."

Steven McDevitt, who left the White House in 2006, said he supervised an internal study that found hundreds of days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices from January 2003 to August 2005. The study stated a range when tallying the total number of days in which an office had no recorded e-mails, from 473 -- which had been previously reported -- to more than 1,000, McDevitt said.

McDevitt also said security was so lax that e-mail could be modified by anyone on the computer network until the middle of 2005.

Administration officials defended their efforts to fix the problems, and said they are still working to locate and identify e-mails reported as missing. "We are very energized about getting to the bottom of this," said Theresa Payton, chief information officer at the Office of Administration.

At the hearing, Payton and GOP lawmakers attacked the 2005 White House study overseen by McDevitt, calling it flawed and unreliable. McDevitt said the 250-page study involved numerous senior technology officials as well as outside contractors.

Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (Va.), the committee's ranking Republican, said in a statement that the missing e-mail allegations are "based on a discredited internal report conveniently leaked to the media." He also said that yesterday's hearing was "less about preserving records and more about resurrecting the spurious claim that the White House 'lost millions of official e-mails.'"

Davis also said, based on a briefing by Payton, that the actual number of days with missing e-mails was 202. "A substantial portion of the so-called 'missing' e-mails appear not to be missing at all, just filed in the wrong digital drawer," Davis said. No other committee member followed up on that allegation during the hearing.

Politicos Squabble Over 'Missing' White House E-Mails

At NewsBlog, Anne Broache reports:

Democrats and Republicans were warring Tuesday over reports that the White House has "lost"--or simply failed to keep--archives of e-mails belonging to the president and his advisers.

Since last spring, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has been investigating reports that an estimated 5 million messages from 473 days between 2003 and 2005 allegedly vanished from e-mail servers housed within the president's office.

A hearing convened by the committee gave Democratic leaders a new chance to press White House officials publicly on how and when they expect to recover the files.

"We still know virtually nothing about the status of the alleged missing White House e-mails," said Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.).

Allen Weinstein, archivist of the United States, said the National Archives and Records Administration had similarly gotten no response from the White House to its queries about what's going on. "I'm concerned about maintaining the fullest possible presidential records," he told the committee.

Republican leaders said they were also concerned about the prospect of missing nuggets of presidential history, but they accused the Democrats of failing to acknowledge the White House's ongoing efforts to retrieve the messages. Republican Ranking Member Tom Davis (R-Va.) said the White House has said it has since reduced the number of days' worth of missing e-mails from 473 to 202 after discovering that those messages had been filed "in the wrong digital drawer" as part of a switch from the Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange e-mail system in 2002.

White House Chief Information Officer Theresa Payton assured the committee that her office is working actively on a multi-step restoration process. Their early results have identified an unspecified number of the previously "missing" messages, though those results still have to be validated.

When pressed by Davis, Payton also said she felt "very comfortable" that they would be able to reconstruct any remaining lost documents from "disaster recovery backup tapes," although she said that process would be time-consuming and could cost at least $15 million.

Did advisers use Republican National Committee accounts?
A separate issue under scrutiny revolves around charges that Karl Rove and some 50 other presidential advisers were using Republican National Committee accounts to conduct official business and thus subvert federal record-keeping laws. The RNC has said it had virtually no records of e-mails sent on its servers by Rove and others before November 2003, which Democrats argue is troubling because those messages may contain important official information about the president's decision to go to war in Iraq.

Waxman said he heard from RNC officials as recently as Monday that the White House had made no effort to request backup tapes from the committee that may contain those files. He scolded White House officials for their inaction. Both Payton and her boss, White House Office of Administration director Alan Swendiman, said they wouldn't be responsible for making such requests but would look into who is.

Republicans accused the Democrats of pursuing the investigation simply to dig up dirt on Rove and waste hundreds of thousands of dollars of money that the RNC could be using to shore up its candidates' campaigns.

"Are we simply going on a fishing expedition at $40,000 to $50,000 a month?" Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) asked National Archives and White House officials at the hearing. "Do any of you know of a single document, because this committee doesn't, that should've been in the archives but in fact was done at the RNC?"

"I think the issue is always, were there official government public records on that system?" responded Gary Stern, general counsel to the National Archives.

The loss of documents in either case is potentially significant because federal laws, including the Presidential Records Act, requires the White House to preserve all documents related to the president and vice president's official business and turn them over to the National Archives. Personal records, including political campaign-related materials, are expected to be filed separately and not subject to the same restrictions. The matter has already sparked a lawsuit from an advocacy group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Clinton administration's archiving problems
The Bush administration isn't the first to encounter problems with missing e-mails. During the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration at one point relied on a flawed e-mail archiving system that failed, among other things, to preserve e-mails sent by people whose names began with the letter D. The situation resulted in congressional hearings and some $11 million spent on reconstructing the some 200,000 missing e-mails, Waxman said.

The problems for the Bush administration apparently started soon after the White House decided to shift its e-mail system from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange in 2002. It also replaced the automated records storage system devised by the Clinton administration with a system that one of its own experts described as "primitive," according to Waxman.

According to the committee, the archive system is an "ad hoc" process called "journaling," in which a White House staffer or contractor manually copies e-mails and saves them on various White House servers. Democrats cast more than a little suspicion on that practice. They cited testimony outside the hearing from a former White House technology worker who said, at least during some points in 2005, those files and directories were available to all 3,000 employees under the umbrella of the executive office of the president.

White House CIO Payton, who began her job in May 2006, said she was unaware of anything of the sort. She also said she had no knowledge of anyone intentionally deleting or tampering with files and later said the copying of messages is automatic, not manual.

"We want to make sure we get all the e-mails over to the (National Archives) at transition" to the next president, she told the committee.

Book Links Jamming to GOP 'High Ups'

Operative imprisoned in case tells his story.

Republican consultant Allen Raymond

The Concord Monitor reports:

The conspiracy to jam New Hampshire Democratic Party phone lines on Election Day 2002 must have gone to the top of the Republican Party, one of the operatives imprisoned in the scheme writes in a forthcoming book.

Republican consultant Allen Raymond writes that he became involved only because he'd been called by James Tobin, then the New England political director for the Republican National Committee.

"The Bush White House had complete control of the RNC, and there was no way someone like Tobin was going to try what he was proposing without first getting it vetted by his high-ups," Raymond wrote in How To Rig an Election, a book set for publication next month. "That's if Tobin, rather than one of his bosses, had even thought of the ploy himself - which seemed unlikely."

Raymond, who once had the same RNC job as Tobin for the mid-Atlantic region, said that before Tobin's call, his telemarketing outfit, GOP Marketplace, had been shut out of RNC jobs. Allen figured he'd lost favor because he publicly aired his disdain for Bush and feuded with a Bush vendor. "I figured this was the Dare - the Bushies' way of making me prove my stripes to get back into the club," he wrote.

In an interview, Raymond said the book had two aims: To entertain - he said he aimed for a cross between Ball Four and Wise Guys (the book Goodfellas was based on) - and to follow the adage "sunlight's the best disinfectant."

"Anybody who reads this book and is mad at me has no sense of humor," he said.

The Monitor obtained an advance copy yesterday. The book is set for release Jan. 8, the day of New Hampshire's presidential primary.

Former gossip columnist Ian Spiegelman, who used to write the New York Post's Page Six, co-wrote the book, which is full of vulgar, colorful language. Raymond said he was connected with Spiegelman through his agent.

"The gossip world at the level he was working is highly charged, highly political," Raymond said. "So I knew that he'd understand what I was talking about."

President Bush is described as a "Connecticut-raised cowboy who'd been blind drunk until he was forty." Steve Forbes, whose presidential campaign Raymond worked for in 2000, "looked like he'd been put together on an operating table" and "had a stammering speech pattern that made you think he was on the verge of a seizure."

Raymond, 40, also knocks the Republican Party that employed him for nearly a decade. "Ever hear the one about the president who picked a land war in the Middle East?" he writes. "Or the one about the vice president who took a scattergun to an old man's face? And then got the old man to apologize for getting shot? That's the type I was dealing with."

Tobin, meanwhile, is painted as a moderate New Englander who'd gone to work for Bush's campaign and "reinvented himself as a full-fledged, Bible-thumping, fear-mongering acolyte for the Holy Connecticut Cowboy."

The U.S. attorneys who handled Tobin's trial also don't escape derision. Prosecutors Nick Marsh and Andrew Levchuk are described as the "pair from Keystone" who "knew exactly nothing" when they took over the case.

The phone-jamming scheme involved repeated hang-up calls made to jam six phone lines - five at the Democratic Party's get-out-the-vote operation and one for a firefighters union offering rides to the polls. Raymond writes that the plan was to tie up the lines all day, but it was aborted after 90 minutes on orders from then-state Republican Party Chairman John Dowd, who insisted it was illegal.

The calls were made on the day of the down-to-the-wire Senate race between Jeanne Shaheen and John Sununu, whose names are almost afterthoughts in the book, mentioned only after pages of discussing the scheme. Sununu won the election by 19,571 votes; the two may face a rematch next year.

Raymond, who served three months in federal prison, and two other men pleaded guilty to criminal conspiracy charges for their roles in the scheme. Chuck McGee, executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party at the time, came up with the idea. Idaho telemarketer Shaun Hansen owned the company that made the calls.

As the phone-jamming blew up in the press and the FBI investigated, Allen wrote, the RNC opted for "the old-school cover-up" route.

Tobin pleaded not guilty, went to trial and was convicted of telephone harassment in 2005. This spring, an appeals court overturned the ruling and sent the case back to U.S. District Court in Concord for further arguments. Tobin is slated for a new trial in February, though Judge Steven McAuliffe is considering a motion to acquit him.

To Raymond, Tobin was the scheme's "linchpin," and he wrote that he "couldn't believe it" when he read in the newspaper that Tobin pleaded not guilty.

"Now, Tobin was not mentally defective; he could not have believed his own lies," Raymond wrote. To Raymond, he said, the key question is: "Who is he protecting?"

Raymond repeatedly notes that the RNC has paid millions for Tobin's legal defense. "My old pals at the Republican National Committee were spending almost $3 million on my coconspirator's legal defense because he was still a loyal member of the GOP family, while at the same time labeling me a liar, a rogue and a thief to any news outlet that would listen," he wrote.

The smaller details of being a man under indictment are also detailed in the book.

Raymond went to great pains to convince lawyers at the Department of Justice that he wasn't what they were expecting - "a slimy D.C. scoundrel in a Gucci suit, French cuffs, tassel shoes and a fat watch." When he was under investigation, he owned three watches worth a total of $6,000 - so he went to CVS and bought a Timex. He also pulled out the first suit he'd owned, "a power tie from 1990" and loafers with a whole.

"When I put the whole ensemble together, (my wife) Elizabeth just clucked her tongue and gave me the thumbs-up," he wrote. "And then I jumped into my Audi and went to my meeting."

In addition to phone jamming, Raymond elaborates on other political dirty tricks, such as using racial tensions to target phone calls in a New Jersey congressional race that sounded as if they were coming in support of his opponent. He deployed the "angry black man" voice on Eastern European Democrats and used actors with "thick Spanish accents" to tape calls aimed at union households.

These days, Raymond said, he's promoting his book, coaching little league and working at a few business ventures on the side. He lives in the Washington, D.C., area with his wife and two elementary-school-age sons.

He's done with working in politics. As a felon, he said, he's not allowed to vote. But if he could, he'd call himself undeclared, no longer a Republican.

"I love politics, but I'm done. I'll never make a living in politics again," Raymond said in the interview. "After what I went through, one, who would hire me? And two, why would I ever want to work for anybody who would hire me?"

Official: Justice Department Slowed Probe Into Phone Jamming

McClatchey reports:

The Justice Department delayed prosecuting a key Republican official for jamming the phones of New Hampshire Democrats until after the 2004 election, protecting top GOP officials from the scandal until the voting was over.

An official with detailed knowledge of the investigation into the 2002 Election-Day scheme said the inquiry sputtered for months after a prosecutor sought approval to indict James Tobin, the northeast regional coordinator for the Republican National Committee.

The phone-jamming operation was aimed at preventing New Hampshire Democrats from rounding up voters in the close U.S. Senate race between Republican Rep. John Sununu and Democratic Gov. Jeanne Shaheen. Sununu's 19,000-vote victory helped the GOP regain control of the Senate.

While there were guilty pleas in the New Hampshire investigation prior to the 2004 presidential election, involvement of the national GOP wasn't confirmed. A Manchester, N.H., policeman quickly traced the jamming to Republican political operatives in 2003 and forwarded the evidence to the Justice Department for what ordinarily would be a straightforward case.

However, the official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, told McClatchy that senior Justice Department officials slowed the inquiry. The official didn't know whether top department officials ordered the delays or what motivated those decisions.

The official said that Terry O'Donnell, a former Pentagon general counsel who was representing Tobin, was in contact with senior department officials before Tobin was indicted.

In October, the House Judiciary Committee opened an investigation to determine whether partisan politics undermined the federal probe.

The official said that department officials rejected prosecutor Todd Hinnen's push to bring criminal charges against the New Hampshire Republican Party.

Weeks before the 2004 election, Hinnen's supervisors directed him to ask a judge to halt action temporarily in a Democratic Party civil suit against the GOP so that it wouldn't hurt the investigation, although Hinnen had expressed no concerns that it would, the official said.

Paul Twomey, a lawyer for the state Democratic Party, said the delay spared Republicans embarrassment at the peak of the campaign because a pending deposition would have revealed that several state GOP officials knew about the scheme, which was hatched by their executive director, Charles McGee. The delay also stalled the case beyond its statute of limitations, depriving Democrats of full discovery, he said.

Citing longstanding policy, spokesman Peter Carr said the Justice Department wouldn't comment on its investigation.

Four men have been convicted in the scandal, including McGee and Republican consultant Allen Raymond, who arranged to jam the phones. Their cooperation led to Tobin's indictment.

In mid-October 2004, Tobin resigned as the Bush-Cheney campaign's regional director after a news report disclosed allegations of his involvement. Bush narrowly lost New Hampshire, the only state he won in 2000 that went for Democrat John Kerry.

Hinnen, now an aide to Democratic presidential candidate and Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden, said he couldn't comment on the investigation.

Tobin was convicted in December 2005 of charges related to the scheme, but won a new trial on appeal. His lawyers didn't respond to e-mailed questions.

National Republican committees have paid more than $6 million to Washington law firms to defend Tobin and fight the civil suit, raising suspicions that there's more to the scandal.

Rep. Paul Hodes, a New Hampshire Democrat who requested the House inquiry, said he considers the delay in indicting Tobin to be ``a miscarriage of justice.''

At the outset, the federal investigation hit a snag when Thomas Colantuono, the U.S. attorney for New Hampshire, withdrew from the case in early 2003 because his wife was a Bush-Cheney campaign worker. Justice Department officials then assigned the case to Hinnen, a prosecutor in the Computer Crimes Section.

HOW THE INVESTIGATION BEGAN

The official with detailed knowledge of the case gave this account of how the case unfolded:

In early 2004, Hinnen got approval from John Malcolm, the deputy chief of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, in early 2004 to investigate Tobin. Malcolm left the department soon afterward.

Hinnen then sought approval from Malcolm's successor, Laura Parsky, to prosecute Tobin but wasn't told until late summer to write a formal, detailed prosecution memo, which he did in early September.

On Oct. 1, 2004, Hinnen got the green light to prepare an indictment, but was directed to first give Tobin lawyer O'Donnell a chance to make his client's case. O'Donnell requested delays and then told Hinnen, Parsky and other senior officials that an unidentified lawyer had advised Tobin that the jamming was legal.

Hinnen argued to his superiors that it was irresponsible for the department to allow Tobin to serve as a Bush campaign official when it had evidence that he'd hindered people from voting.

In late October 2004, Justice Department officials told Hinnen it was too close to the election to bring such a politically sensitive indictment, putting it off until late November.

In early 2005, Hinnen submitted a lengthy memo arguing for a criminal indictment treating the New Hampshire Republican State Committee as a corporate entity. Hinnen noted that the party lacked an ethics policy at the time of the phone jamming and that its officials had refused to share with prosecutors the results of an internal investigation of the scheme.

Craig Donsanto, the chief of the department's Election Crimes Branch, objected to an indictment, arguing that the state GOP's ``shareholders'' are the voters.

Ultimately, John Keeney, a career deputy assistant attorney general, directed Hinnen to drop the idea.

Keeney, Donsanto and Parsky, now a San Diego County judge, didn't respond to phone calls.

In August, 2005, Hinnen was detailed for 18 months to a National Security Council job in the White House, leaving other prosecutors to handle Tobin's trial.

GOP Trickster Says He Was A Scapegoat

Phone jammer claims higher-ups in the party took part in the scheme in New Hampshire

The Houston Chronicle reports:

A former GOP political operative who ran an illegal Election Day scheme to jam the phone lines of New Hampshire Democrats during the state's tight 2002 U.S. Senate election said in a new book and an interview that he believes the scandal reaches higher into the Republican Party.

Allen Raymond of Bethesda, Md., whose book Simon & Schuster will publish next month, also accused the GOP of trying to hang the blame for a scandal on him as part of an "old-school cover-up."

Raymond's book, How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, offers a raw glimpse of the phone scandal as it unraveled and of a ruthless world in which political operatives seek to win at all costs.

McClatchy obtained an advance copy of the book.

The 2002 New Hampshire Senate race, in which GOP Rep. John Sununu edged Democratic Gov. Jeanne Shaheen by 19,000 votes, was among several targeted by Republicans seeking to win control of the U.S. Senate.

Raymond said those who have tried to make him the fall guy for the New Hampshire scheme failed to recognize that e-mails, phone records and other evidence documented the complicity of a top state GOP official and the Republican National Committee's northeast regional director.

Both men were later convicted of charges related to the phone harassment, along with Raymond and an Idaho phone bank operator. Defense lawyers have since won a retrial for James Tobin, the former regional director for both the RNC and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

A lawyer for Tobin didn't respond to phone messages.

GOP committees have paid Washington law firms more than $6 million to defend Tobin and to fight a Democratic civil suit against the party. Raymond, himself a former RNC official, said he believes that the scandal reaches higher.

"Any tactic that didn't pass the smell test would never see the light of day without, at the very least, the approval of an RNC attorney," he wrote.

Paul Twomey, a lawyer for the New Hampshire Democratic Party, said that phone records obtained in the civil suit showed that Tobin made 22 calls to the White House political office in the 24 hours before and after the jamming.

Twomey said Tobin refused to testify about the calls, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

Asked about Raymond's book, RNC spokesman Danny Diaz said that "it would be hard to find two less credible individuals" than Raymond and co-author Ian Spiegelman, who lost his job as a New York Post gossip columnist for sending a threatening e-mail accusing a source of trying to plant a fake story.

Raymond, who served three months in jail last year, said he earned a graduate degree in political management solely to make money off politics, and it made no difference to him whether he was a Republican or a Democrat.

Phone-Jamming Scandal May Finally Be Solved

At the Huffington Post, Thomas B. Edsall writes:

One of the long-standing mysteries of the Bush presidency is whether the White House and Justice Department were involved in a 2002 New Hampshire voter suppression scandal that produced three criminal convictions but never touched the administration.

Now, with Democrats back in control of Congress, this mystery may finally get cleared up. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and subcommittee chairs, plan to investigate the controversial role of the Justice Department in the case.

There are two key issues questions involving Justice:

First, whether top officials there blocked a New Hampshire prosecutor from pursuing leads involving the White House and both the Republican National and Senatorial Committees.

Second, whether the Department purposely delayed prosecution of the one defendant with ties to the RNC and NRSC until after the 2004 election. The Department did attempt on October 15, 2004, just over two weeks before the election, to block depositions of key witnesses in a civil suit brought by the New Hampshire Democratic Party.

The vote suppression/phone jamming operation was dreamed up in 2002 by Charles McGee, executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party, who obtained phone numbers of Democratic support groups offering Election Day rides to the polls, according to McGee's court testimony.

McGee then hired an Idaho telemarketing company to flood those numbers with phony calls, blocking all legitimate requests for help getting rides to the polls.

Initially, McGee's plan worked perfectly. For two hours, the Idaho firm tied up Democratic Party and pro-Democratic union phone lines, preventing seniors and others needing a lift to their voting places from being able to request rides.

"The phones were starting to ring, and as I would pick up one phone, it automatically bumped over to another line," testified Manchester firefighter Jeffery S. Duval, who was working the phones at his union's headquarters. "There was nobody on any of the phones. The phone lines were dead once we went to pick them up... We gave the police department a call."

Realizing there could be criminal implications, Republican leaders quickly ordered the telemarketing company to stop the jamming, according to court testimony. The FBI and the Justice Department were then called in because the allegations involved violations of federal telecommunications law.

The effort helped John E. Sununu (R) beat Jeanne Shaheen (D) in a tight Senate race by 51 to 47 percent, a 19,151-vote margin.

In addition to the questions about the role of the Justice Department, there were strong indications of involvement on the part of the White House and other D.C.-based pro-Republican groups:

* Over the course of 4 hours on Election Day, just as New Hampshire police began investigating the scheme to jam the phones, James Tobin, Northeast Regional Director for the Republican National and Senatorial Committees, made 22 phone calls to the White House political office, according to court records.

* Later, when Tobin was tried, the Republican National Committee paid $2.8 million to cover his legal fees. Tobin was found guilty, but an appeals court threw out the verdict on the grounds that the judge's orders to the jury were inadequate, and ordered a new trial. No date has been set.

* Another defendant in the case testified that when the phone-jamming operation was brought to a halt, an American Gas Association lobbyist, Darrell Henry, said he would get the Chamber of Commerce to take over the effort to disrupt the Democratic get out the vote undertaking. When Henry was deposed, he refused to answer questions, asserting his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself.

Danny Diaz, a RNC spokesman, contends a congressional inquiry into the New Hampshire case is unjustified: "The questions regarding the New Hampshire issue have been answered time and again. Additional activity on this front is solely for political purposes and is a questionable usage of taxpayer dollars."

In a letter to Acting Attorney General Peter D. Keisler, Conyers and the subcommittee chairs, Robert C. Scott (D-VA), Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), and Linda Sánchez (D-CA), detailed the Tobin-White House calls, the payment by the RNC of Tobin's legal fees, and then stated:

"Despite this compelling evidence of Washington involvement in the election day jamming of Democratic phone lines, however, the FBI Special Agent working this matter allegedly was instructed not to follow investigative leads back to Washington.

"In addition, the attorney for one of the phone jamming defendants has stated that he was told by a federal prosecutor that 'all decisions in this case had to be made subject to the approval of the Attorney General himself, who had to sign off on all actions in this case,' an unusual state of affairs for a criminal prosecution."

The prime mover behind the congressional inquiry is freshman Representative Paul Hodes (D-NH) who has been pressing both the House and Senate to take action.

UPDATE On The Use of RNC E-Mail Accounts by White House Officials

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform reports:

The Oversight Committee has been investigating whether White House officials violated the Presidential Records Act by using e-mail accounts maintained by the Republican National Committee and the Bush Cheney ‘04 campaign for official White House communications. This interim staff report provides a summary of the evidence the Committee has received to date, along with recommendations for next steps in the investigation.

The information the Committee has received in the investigation reveals:

The number of White House officials given RNC e-mail accounts is higher than previously disclosed. In March 2007, White House spokesperson Dana Perino said that only a “handful of officials” had RNC e-mail accounts. In later statements, her estimate rose to “50 over the course of the administration.” In fact, the Committee has learned from the RNC that at least 88 White House officials had RNC e-mail accounts. The officials with RNC e-mail accounts include Karl Rove, the President’s senior advisor; Andrew Card, the former White House Chief of Staff; Ken Mehlman, the former White House Director of Political Affairs; and many other officials in the Office of Political Affairs, the Office of Communications, and the Office of the Vice President.

White House officials made extensive use of their RNC e-mail accounts. The RNC has preserved 140,216 e-mails sent or received by Karl Rove. Over half of these e-mails (75,374) were sent to or received from individuals using official “.gov” e-mail accounts. Other heavy users of RNC e-mail accounts include former White House Director of Political Affairs Sara Taylor (66,018 e-mails) and Deputy Director of Political Affairs Scott Jennings (35,198 e-mails). These e-mail accounts were used by White House officials for official purposes, such as communicating with federal agencies about federal appointments and policies.

There has been extensive destruction of the e-mails of White House officials by the RNC. Of the 88 White House officials who received RNC e-mail accounts, the RNC has preserved no e-mails for 51 officials. In a deposition, Susan Ralston, Mr. Rove’s former executive assistant, testified that many of the White House officials for whom the RNC has no e-mail records were regular users of their RNC e-mail accounts. Although the RNC has preserved no e-mail records for Ken Mehlman, the former Director of Political Affairs, Ms. Ralston testified that Mr. Mehlman used his account “frequently, daily.” In addition, there are major gaps in the e-mail records of the 37 White House officials for whom the RNC did preserve e-mails. The RNC has preserved only 130 e-mails sent to Mr. Rove during President Bush’s first term and no e-mails sent by Mr. Rove prior to November 2003. For many other White House officials, the RNC has no e-mails from before the fall of 2006.

There is evidence that the Office of White House Counsel under Alberto Gonzales may have known that White House officials were using RNC e-mail accounts for official business, but took no action to preserve these presidential records. In her deposition, Ms. Ralston testified that she searched Mr. Rove’s RNC e-mail account in response to an Enron-related investigation in 2001 and the investigation of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald later in the Administration. According to Ms. Ralston, the White House Counsel’s office knew about these e-mails because “all of the documents we collected were then turned over to the White House Counsel’s office.” There is no evidence, however, that White House Counsel Gonzales initiated any action to ensure the preservation of the e-mail records that were destroyed by the RNC.

The Presidential Records Act requires the President to “take all such steps as may be necessary to assure that the activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of his constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties are adequately documented … and maintained as Presidential records.” To implement this legal requirement, the White House Counsel issued clear written policies in February 2001 instructing White House staff to use only the official White House e-mail system for official communications and to retain any official e-mails they received on a nongovernmental account.

The evidence obtained by the Committee indicates that White House officials used their RNC e-mail accounts in a manner that circumvented these requirements. At this point in the investigation, it is not possible to determine precisely how many presidential records may have been destroyed by the RNC. Given the heavy reliance by White House officials on RNC e-mail accounts, the high rank of the White House officials involved, and the large quantity of missing e-mails, the potential violation of the Presidential Records Act may be extensive.

There are several next steps that should be pursued in the investigation into the use of RNC e-mail accounts by White House officials. First, the records of federal agencies should be examined to assess whether they may contain some of the White House e-mails that have been destroyed by the RNC. The Committee has already written to 25 federal agencies to inquire about the e-mail records they may have retained from White House officials who used RNC and Bush Cheney ’04 e-mail accounts. Preliminary responses from the agencies indicate that they may have preserved official communications that were destroyed by the RNC.

Second, the Committee should investigate what former White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales knew about the use of political e-mail accounts by White House officials. If Susan Ralston’s testimony to the Committee is accurate, there is evidence that Mr. Gonzales or counsels working in his office knew in 2001 that Karl Rove was using his RNC e-mail account to communicate about official business, but took no action to preserve Mr. Rove’s official communications.

Third, the Committee may need to issue compulsory process to obtain the cooperation of the Bush Cheney ’04 campaign. The campaign has informed the Committee that it provided e-mail accounts to 11 White House officials, but the campaign has unjustifiably refused to provide the Committee with basic information about these accounts, such as the identity of the White House officials and the number of e-mails that have been preserved.


Documents and Links
• Investigation of Possible Violations of the Presidential Records Act [.pdf]
• Deposition of Susan Ralston [.pdf]
• Errata Sheet for Deposition of Susan Ralston [.pdf]