Does Anybody Know Where My Policy Laptop Is?

The Los Angeles Times delves deep into the issue of the White House’s parallel RNC communications system today. Democrats, particularly the House’s chief investigator, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), have been pushing to get their hands on those emails — based on the suspicion that the White House has been using those alternate email addresses to avoid keeping a record that might be vulnerable to subpoena.

The piece doesn’t satisfy my curiosity. Maybe, Tom Hamburger reports, they’re chock full of revealing, embarrassing material (says one GOP activist, “There is concern about what may be in these e-mails”) or maybe they’re all long gone because the RNC has a policy of purging “some emails” after 30 days — or maybe it’ll be a long, long time before Congress sees any emails, because the White House is bound to fight it out based on a stretched claim of executive privilege.

But it’s humorous to watch the administration justify the problem by pointing a finger at the Clinton White House, which first instituted a parallel communications system:

When Karl Rove and his top deputies arrived at the White House in 2001, the Republican National Committee provided them with laptop computers and other communication devices to be used alongside their government-issued equipment.

The back-channel e-mail and paging system, paid for and maintained by the RNC, was designed to avoid charges that had vexed the Clinton White House — that federal resources were being used inappropriately for political campaign purposes….

“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.”

Clinton’s director of politcal affairs Doug Sosnik, quoted in the article, says that the Clinton White House did set aside a “small number of separate computers and cellphones.”

But, of course, there’s a difference here. The line between policy and politics wasn’t so very blurry then. For instance, the recent focus on the White House’s parallel system is due to Karl Rove’s deputy Scott Jennings’ use of his RNC address to communicate with the Justice Department’s Kyle Sampson about the U.S. attorney purge. But no campaign computers or cellphones were used to communicate with the Justice Department during the Clinton years, Sosnik says.

Rove’s habits are instructional. Rove, remember, has a White House address — as well as an RNC-issued blackberry and laptop. But according to a former White House official quoted in National Journal, Rove “does ‘about 95 percent’ of his e-mailing using his RNC-based account.”

So perhaps the system did start as an imitation of the Clinton system. But the similarities end there.