White House Destroys Emails Sought by Congressional Investigators

By Scott Horton

Just as Henry Waxman and his House Oversight Committee gear up to go after White House traffic involving unauthorized email servers, the White House announces that the emails were "accidentally lost."

The White House said Wednesday it had mishandled Republican Party-sponsored e-mail accounts used by nearly two dozen presidential aides, resulting in the loss of an undetermined number of e-mails concerning official White House business.

Congressional investigators looking into the administration's firing of eight federal prosecutors already had the nongovernmental e-mail accounts in their sights because some White House aides used them to help plan the U.S. attorneys' ouster. Democrats were questioning whether the use of the GOP-provided e-mail accounts was proof that the firings were political.

The details of how this happened remain to be fleshed out. My computer literate friends tell me that it is essentially impossible to "accidentally" lose large volumes of email off a server in the way suggested in this report. It would take a concerted effort, and even then the erased data can usually be retrieved. Normal practice would involve making back-ups and archiving the email. And considering the sensitivity of this traffic, the claim that they were lost as the result of an "accident" is not going to be quickly accepted.

Senator Patrick Leahy, a former career prosecutor, had a skeptical take on these developments:

"This sounds like the administration's version of the dog ate my homework," said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) "I am deeply disturbed that just when this administration is finally subjected to meaningful oversight, it cannot produce the necessary information."

Meanwhile The Politico adds:

This is a big problem for the White House, and Waxman said it raised "serious legal and security concerns" about the e-mail related activities of Bush administration aides.

It looks like the tactics of the White House in its response to the Congressional investigation have just entered a new phase. If a responsible prosecutor were presented with evidence suggesting even the possibility of the conscious destruction of evidence, he would take immediate steps: subpoena the relevant White House staffers' personal PCs, subpoena and depose the personnel involved in the alleged "accidental" erasure, and send FBI agents to seize the RNC's servers which were "erased." Which explains the ever more urgent need for the appointment of a special prosecutor in this case.