Rove's Lawyer: He Didn't Intend to Delete Emails

By Scott Horton

For the last forty-eight hours a number of stories have been circulated about the five million White House emails which apparently were deleted, and particularly the thousands of missing emails by Karl Rove. How did they come to be deleted? Who deleted them? Were the deletions intentional? Today Rove’s lawyer Robert Luskin states that Rove didn’t “intend” to delete the emails because he understood that they were being retained on the Republican National Committee’s server. The Associated Press reports:

Karl Rove's lawyer on Friday dismissed the notion that President Bush's chief political adviser intentionally deleted his own e-mails from a Republican sponsored server, saying Rove believed the communications were being preserved in accordance with the law....

"His understanding starting very, very early in the administration was that those e-mails were being archived," Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, said.

The prosecutor probing the Valerie Plame spy case saw and copied all of Rove's e-mails from his various accounts after searching Rove's laptop, his home computer, and the handheld computer devices he used for both the White House and Republican National Committee, Luskin said.

Luskin also acknowledged that he was notified by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that Rove emails on his White House account from 2003 were not saved, as required by federal law. Will this be the “18 minute gap” of the Bush administration? Things seem to be developing in that direction, but it’s still early in the process.