On Fox today, Karl Rove said the White House “potentially violated federal law” by sending out an email last week to people who hadn’t signed up for such emails.
Over the past week, Fox News and some Republicans have accused the White House of using political groups to gather email addresses, a charge the administration has denied. White House officials have said they only get addresses through their web site, and have blamed third parties for possibly signing people up without their permission.
But Fox, and Rove, are not convinced.
Rove suggested today that a White House staffer may have mined the Internet for email addresses.
“I think they might have somebody in the new media office with a background in Google … who may know how to do some drift net mining of email addresses and tossing them into the White House email system,” Rove said. “And that is frankly a violation of federal law.”
He went further, saying the act of sending out a mass email — in this case promoting health care reform — counts as advertising and is therefore “a problem” and possibly illegal.
Now, here’s the kicker: Rove said that if he had done something like this while working for the Bush administration, he’d have been burned alive. Here it is, in graphic detail:
I’d be on a cart, being dragged down Pennsylvania Avenue on a bunch of hay and taken to a giant mound of firewood, where I’d be tied to a post and Nancy Pelosi would take a lighted pitch and thrown it onto the firewood if I had done this. … This is amazing to me, what these people are able to get away with. If the Bush White House had done this, you’re right, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi would have had me out for a little barbecue on the National Mall and I would be the meal.
Last night, the White House announced changes to its email policy to make it both more secure and easier to opt out. It also disabled flag@whitehouse.gov, which conservative critics claimed amounted to collecting an “enemies list,” which even President Obama himself denied.
