Oh, joy! They're starting to ask questions!

[babylonsister]

There's a good, fairly thorough Q&A in this piece...

http://www.kstp.com/article/stories/S54282.shtml?cat=146

White House E-Mail Raises Questions


The uproar over the firing of eight federal prosecutors has spawned a new controversy at the White House over questionable e-mail accounts and lost presidential records.

Aides to President Bush improperly used Republican Party-sponsored e-mail accounts for official business, the administration acknowledges, and lost an undetermined number of e-mails in the process.

The "mistake," as the White House is calling it, was discovered inadvertently through Congress’ ongoing probe of the administration’s dismissal of the U.S. attorneys.

In the thousands of pages of documents the Justice Department has given to congressional investigators were e-mails disclosing that at least one White House official used his party-supplied, non-governmental e-mail account to help plan the firings.

But the issue potentially has broader implications than the outcry about the dismissals.

snip//

Q: Why do Democrats care?

A: For one thing, they want to know if e-mails showing Jennings discussing the firings on his gwb43.com account are proof that the dismissals were not solely performance-based, as the administration has been saying, but done as retribution against prosecutors who either did not pursue Democrats aggressively enough or they pursued Republicans too aggressively.

Then there is the broader suspicion.

The White House essentially says the loss of e-mails dealing with official business, as well as the improper use of the political accounts, was an honest mistake. The White House mostly places the blame on a policy it said left staffers too ill-informed about the records act’s requirements to make sure e-mails were properly archived.

The White House also says staffers probably conducted official business via the political accounts "out of an abundance of caution" regarding the Hatch Act or to avoid the inconvenience of switching back and forth. But it won’t say whether anyone deliberately used the accounts to keep discussions about sensitive official issues from being preserved _ and eventually publicly released _ through the White House archive system. Stanzel wouldn’t even say whether the White House review aims to answer this question.

Democrats believe it’s unlikely that people working for a 6-year-old administration would not fully understand their obligations to preserve presidential materials. They want to know if the e-mails were deliberately funneled through the RNC system and deleted to shield certain things from the public eye.

Democratic suspicion increased Thursday when Rep. Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who is chairman of a House committee looking into the use of political e-mail accounts, reported on a briefing he received from RNC lawyer Rob Kelner. Waxman said he was told the RNC in 2005 shut off the ability of Rove _ and only Rove _ to delete his own e-mails.

Waxman said one factor was "the presence of investigative or discovery requests or other legal concerns." At the time, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald was investigating the leak of the name of a CIA. officer, a probe in which Rove was a key figure. Rove’s attorney, Robert Luskin, said, "There’s never been any suggestion that Fitzgerald had anything less than a complete record" on Rove.

more...

[NightWatcher]

1. Accident? They accidentally started using an outside server

to dodge the Presidential Records Act? That in and of itself should be yet another impeachable offense. Let's make the WH prove that they did hide the gwb43.com emails.

[Bitwit1234]

2. A federal employee that was not familiar with the Hatch Act

What kind of briefing did the white house employees get. That's is discussed over and over in most orientation talks.

[Frustratedlady]

3. Someone just asked (during WH press conference)

why Miers didn't do something about it, as she knew about it quite a while ago. The answer was that she no longer works at the White House.

I think her "retirement" was a lot more involved than the reasons we were given.

[Dhalgren]

4. I don't care whether she's retired or not. Put her ass in front of the

committee, under oath and put the questions to her!

[AndyA]

7. DING! DING!! DING!!! BINGO!!!! You get the prize.

How very astute of you to consider such a possibility.

And just think, this woman could have been sitting on the SCOTUS today, if Bushie had his way. (SHUDDER!)

[merh]

5. whose email server were they using on this night

while they sat in The People's House

Susan Ralston: Traitorgate, Abramoff scandal, AND election theft witness?

Susan Ralston, former assistant to Karl Rove, has testified again to the new grand jury convened by Patrick Fitzgerald, regarding how calls to Rove were logged by the White House.

She was also Jack Abramoff's personal secretary.

And in looking for a photo, I was reminded of another photo from a year ago:




There she is, with Rove, at his bank of computers, monitoring precinct-level returns on election night. Many of us wondered at the time what in the world Rove would be doing with all those computers, and why it was important in the wee hours of election night for him to be "monitoring" results on the precinct level. (Not to mention that running this campaign-related operation from the WH dining room was technically illegal.)

If she knows simple facts that lay out the timeline and activities of key players in the CIA leak case and the Abramoff scandal that are of use to prosecutors in untangling lies and inconsistent testimony, there is a good chance that this is also the case with regard to the theft of the 2004 election.

What was she doing for Rove that night? What were her duties? What kinds of data was she handling? Simple questions like these could end up having the kind of explosive impact for the election theft story that her testimony about the WH call-logging procedures may be having for the CIA leak case.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5467221

thanks bleever :hi:

NGU :patriot:

[gratuitous]

6. News flash for KSTP: It's not just Democrats who care about this

All red-blooded, patriotic Americans who care about and love their country, its constitution and its laws care about this abuse of power and obstruction of justice. And the American people need to know whether their president and the people around him are liars and demagogues.

The major question raised by your story, KSTP, is why this naked corruption doesn't seem to bother your station or anyone in your newsroom. Are you that indifferent to the laws of the country? Are you that infatuated with a grinning dictator? Grow up, grow a spine, and get cracking on the job you're supposed to be doing as an entity entrusted with a portion of the public airwaves.