… that the White House, so amazingly paranoid about disclosure of information and the breaking of secrets would set up a parallel, unofficial set of e-mail accounts for White House personnel to use, hosted and handled via the Republican National Comittee, outside of the normal, high-security White House e-mail. Of course, that might have relieved that e-mail from federal record-keeping and disclosure requirements, but surely creating such a huge security and record retention hole in the Administration seems remarkable for the Bush White House, no?
… and that the White House has, remarkably, “mishandled” some of that internal e-mail that was run on those GOP mail systems, including, remarkably, information that might be related to the Federal Prosecutor firings, such that the info is not available to review by, well, anyone.
Huh. Imagine that.
The Republican National Committee set up the accounts for about 20 Bush aides, such as Karl Rove and his deputies, who get involved in politics, spokesman Scott Stanzel said. Having the GOP create non-White House addresses and provide separate BlackBerries, laptops and other communications gear was designed to avoid running afoul of Hatch Act rules barring federal employees from engaging in political activities with government resources or on government time, he said.
Under President Clinton, White House aides used separate equipment for political spadework but did not have separate accounts. “This is entirely appropriate,” Stanzel said of the Bush White House practice.
He said staffers used their RNC accounts instead of White House accounts to discuss the prosecutor issue or conduct other official business for several reasons, including extra caution about complying with the Hatch Act as well as the convenience of using one account instead of several. Stanzel said he could not speak to whether anyone was intentionally trying to avoid White House archiving because he had not spoken to all those involved.
Stanzel said some e-mails have been lost because the White House lacked clear policies on complying with Presidential Records Act requirements.
“The dog ate my e-mail.”
(via BoingBoing)
You know…
I hear tell that the NSA has all of these wonderful data mining and recovery programs, seems a shame that they couldn’t have a go at some quality data recovery chances. ;P
I remember when some of the Clinton White House email was on a zip disk that went bad, and they said they couldn’t provide the email documents. My two thoughts were: yeah, zip disks suck, and that’s what data-recovery companies are for.
The only sure way to have data go unrecoverable is to put it on tape and incinerate the tape storage. Or to put it on a hard disk drive and grind down the plate of the hard drive. Anything else has been recovered by specialists, but usually at a steep price. I have heard accounts up to $100,000.
One a different issue, Crooks and Liars has a story that the WH has lost over 5 million emails. I am sorry, but that is no accident. Anyone that has spent a day with people that handle data servers of any kind know this is BS! You don’t just loose 5 million emails.
Whatever… same ol’ same ol’ for Bush