Karl Rove Faces More Inquiries

By Scott Horton

Eliot Spitzer established himself as one of New York’s great attorneys general and paved the road to the state house by bringing a series of astonishing lawsuits against major financial and brokerage houses. The key to the successes he quickly racked up was simple: he grabbed the targets’ emails. People in public life are generally very cautious about what they write in letters. But emails are another matter. They are composed quickly and frequently reflect stream-of-consciousness thinking – what someone might say in an unguarded conversation, rather than what would be said in a formal presentation. The email is a medium in which the snide or insulting comment comes quickly to the fore, now increasingly to the author’s embarrassment.

Which helps to explain why Henry Waxman is so keen on seeing the emails that Karl Rove and some of his close associates have done on Republican National Committee mail accounts – and why the White House is so intent on not disclosing them.

Today’s Los Angeles Times has a fascinating exploration of the subject done by Tom Hamburger (one of the best investigative journalists at the LAT, or at any other paper). Money quote:

"There is concern about what may be in these e-mails," said one GOP activist who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject.

"The system was created with the best intentions," said former Assistant White House Press Secretary Adam Levine, who was assigned an RNC laptop and BlackBerry when he worked at the White House in 2002. But, he added, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

The issue first surfaced in connection with the criminal investigation into Jack Abramoff. Key communications between Abramoff and White House staffers, particularly those close to Karl Rove, invariably went to non-official, RNC-connected email accounts. The same phenomenon has now been detected with respect to the still unfolding scandal concerning the purging of U.S. attorneys.

In the U.S. attorney case, Rove deputy Jennings used the RNC e-mail system to write to D. Kyle Sampson, then Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales' chief of staff, in August 2006 about replacing Arkansas U.S. Atty. H.E. "Bud" Cummins III with former Rove protege Tim Griffin.

"We're a go for the U.S. atty plan. WH leg, political and communications have signed off and acknowledged that we have to be committed to following through once the pressure comes," Jennings wrote in an e-mail from the gwb43.com domain name. Sampson noted in a related e-mail that "getting him appointed was important to" Rove, then-White House Counsel Harriet E. Miers and other officials.

The gwb43.com account, and others like it, have been traced to the Republican National Committee computer servers, Waxman's staff said.

There is nothing per se wrong with White House staffers using their RNC accounts for communications purposes. The problem arises when they use those accounts to conduct official White House business, which, under the Presidential Records Act is to be maintained for posterity and separated from partisan political affairs. But the issue which arises from the email traffic that has been disclosed already is slightly different: the White House staffers seem incapable of distinguishing partisan political affairs from questions of national policy. Indeed, increasing numbers of observers say that about the White House itself.