Bush Aides' Misuse of E-Mail Detailed by House Committee
"White House aides made extensive use of political e-mail accounts for official government business, despite rules requiring that they conduct such business through official communications channels, according to new evidence disclosed yesterday by congressional investigators.Read more.
The Republican National Committee told the investigators that White House senior political adviser Karl Rove alone sent or received more than 140,000 e-mails between 2002 and 2007, more than half of which involved individuals using official ".gov" e-mail accounts, a report from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said. The RNC said it still has copies of those e-mails.
Former Rove assistant Susan B. Ralston affirmed in a deposition released by the committee that her ex-boss used his political e-mail account "most of the time."
The White House previously acknowledged that aides to President Bush improperly used the political e-mail accounts. But the material released yesterday details for the first time how frequently they used the accounts and for what purposes.
The committee said it learned that the White House aides used the RNC accounts to discuss official matters such as appointments and grant announcements. It also said at least 88 White House officials had RNC e-mail accounts, a figure above previous administration statements that only about 50 had such accounts.
The report also said many RNC e-mails involving others besides Rove and one of his aides have been lost, either under its deletion policy or individual deletions by senior officials. "As a result of these policies, potentially hundreds of thousands of White House e-mails have been destroyed, many of which may be presidential records," the report said.
Congressional Democrats have suggested that Rove and other White House officials may have used the political accounts to avoid scrutiny of their decisions from Congress, but the report offered no evidence about their motives. Ralston said Rove believed all of his e-mails were being saved even though the RNC had a policy until 2004 of destroying all e-mails after 30 days...."
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