Interesting. More details coming from this morning’s gaggle on how those RNC-White House emails just happened to get deleted.
Senate Judiciary Committee authorizes subpoenas for Justice Department documents, White House emails, White House officials….
Check out Dan Froomkin’s new piece just up on the Post website in which he shows how clear it must have been to the White House officials in question that they were violating the White House’s own stated policies in this whole RNC email situation.
Leahy on the White House story about the RNC emails: They’re Lying!
This morning’s press gaggle with White House spokesman Scott Stanzel was a fun one.
A quote:
…what you’re talking about is the user’s ability, if they are sitting at their laptop, and decide that, ‘gosh, I’ve got a hundred emails here that I just — are cluttering up my inbox, I want to put them in the deleted file, and I right-click the deleted items to empty my deleted file.’ It’s possible, possible, that those records could have been lost….
Check out the Republican National Committee’s entire case against Nancy Pelosi — all in one tidy memo.
He’s so good he plays both sides of the argument. Jon Cohn makes the case against single-payer.
And if you’re just tuning in to this week’s Book Club, a summary of what you’ve missed.
From TPM Reader DS …
You should post a shout-out to anyone who has ever been investigated by the federal government who claimed to have deleted some relevant e-mails. What did the Justice Department, IRS, or SEC do in response? Particularly relevant would be industries that have mandatory document retention policies, such as the financial sector. The tales would be rather amusing at this point, I imagine.
If you’re a Republican lawyer, you just can’t beat having the muscle of the Justice Department to pursue Democrats.
I think White House pressers Scott Stanzel can do a little better on telling us why the White House changed their email retention policy for RNC emails back in 2004. Some pretty canny reporter asked this question this morning in the gaggle …
Reporter: On the change in policy in ’04, wasn’t that in response to Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into the White House and the need, in response to his inquiries, to preserve records?
Stanzel: I don’t know the reasons for that change. That’s our understanding of when that change occurred. But the White House Counsel’s Office is working with the RNC counsel to be sure and to gather more information about when changes were made and why they were made….
I can say that I am very confident, very confident that that reporter is correct and that orders from Pat Fitzgerald were the reason for the change in White House policy in 2004. So the change in policy was tied to yet another criminal investigation of the White House. And the White House and the key employees in question — namely Karl Rove and people working for him at the White House political office — were specifically on notice not to destroy the emails they sent through the RNC servers. And yet they took affirmative steps to continue destroying them, even after all of this had happened.