WASHINGTON, 20 June 2007 — By using Republican National Committee e-mail accounts for official business, senior White House aides may have broken a law requiring them to preserve presidential records, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said in an interim report on Monday.
“This should be a matter of grave concern for anyone who values open government and the preservation of an accurate historical record,” said Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-California, adding that the panel will deepen its probe into the use of political e-mail accounts.
“These e-mail accounts were used by White House officials for official purposes, such as communicating with federal agencies about federal appointments and policies,” the report said.
E-mail records are missing for 51 of the 88 White House officials who had electronic message accounts with the RNC, said the report.
The Presidential Records Act of 1978 requires White House officials to save official correspondence.
While the White House automatically archives its e-mail the RNC typically deletes messages on its server older than 30 days, the report said. (read the report at: http://oversight.house.gov/story.asp?ID=1362).
These instances of noncompliance were not as dramatic as some of statements that have caused the most stir, such as Bush’s suggestion that he was not bound by a ban on torture in US military detention facilities. But congressional aides said they are significant.
The House committee first learnt of the parallel e-mail system when investigating which White House officials had contact with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, when White House adviser Karl Rove’s assistant, Susan Ralston, sent an e-mail to Abramoff’s associate Todd Boulanger, which said: “I now have an RNC BlackBerry which you can use to e-mail me at any time. No security issues like my WH email.”
The House committee has dismissed White House claims that officials acted out of ignorance.
The White House Counsel issued “clear written policies” in February 2001 that White House staff should only use the official White House e-mail system for official communications.
To this, the White House previously acknowledged that aides to President Bush improperly used the political e-mail accounts.
But the material released Monday details for the first time how frequently they used the accounts and for what purposes.
According to the Presidential Records Act, White House officials are obliged to keep and preserve all communications which they send on official government business.
But some 88 Bush officials ignored this law. Instead, they used addresses supplied by the RNC, which raises funds and promotes the Republican Party.
The report is especially critical of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, for actions when he headed the White House Counsel’s office. There is evidence that under Gonzales the office “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,” the report said.
Republicans said there is no evidence that the law was violated or that the missing emails were of a government rather than political nature. But Democratic lawmakers jumped on what they see as the actions of an imperial presidency with little respect for the law or the legislative branch.
“The administration is thumbing its nose at the law,” said House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr., D-Michigan, who requested the GAO study and legal opinion along with Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Virginia.
“This GAO opinion underscores the fact that the Bush White House is constantly grabbing for more power, seeking to drive the people’s branch of government to the sidelines,” Byrd said in a joint statement with Conyers.
White House spokesman Tony Snow said of the claim: “That’s an allegation. We’ll respond to it in due course.” White House officials have dismissed such concerns as overblown, suggesting that the statements were staking out legal positions, not broadcasting the administration’s intentions.
Nevertheless, the GAO’s findings are legally significant, said Bruce Fein, a conservative constitutional lawyer who served on an American Bar Association task force that excoriated the president’s use of signing statements in a report last year.
But the GAO report suggests that the dispute over signing statements is not an academic one, Fein said, adding that Congress could use the report to take collective legal action against the White House.
“At least it makes clear the signing statements aren’t solely for staking out a legal position, with the president just saying, ‘I don’t have to do these things, but I will,’ “ Fein said. “In fact they are not doing some of these things. You can’t just vaporize it as an academic question.”
