Rove may have deleted his own emails on RNC server

I found this through TPM Muckraker. It is a letter from Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, requesting that Gonzales "preserve any e-mail communications in the possession or control of your agency that were received from or sent to White House officials using RNC or other nongovernmental email accounts."

Now according to RNC counsel Rob Kelner, "roughly 50" Bush White House officials had email accounts on RNC email servers. The earliest email records of White House officials on RNC servers are from 2004. Kelner says that the RNC has destroyed all email records from 2001 to 2003. The RNC currently has email records for 35 of the 50 officials, meaning that that "the RNC appears to have no e-mail records for approximately 15 White House officials who had RNC e-mail accounts.

Now here is the blockbuster from Waxman's letter:

The briefing from Mr. Kelner also raised questions about how complete the RNC record of e-mails is from 2004 to the present. Mr. Kelner told the Committee staff that White House officials retained the ability to delete e-mails from the RNC server until as recently as this month.

According to Mr. Kelner, the RNC had a policy, which the RNC called a "document retention" policy, that purged all e-mails from RNC e-mail accounts and the RNC server that were more than 30 days old. Mr. Kelner said that as a result of unspecified legal inquiries, a "hold" was placed on this e-mail destruction policy for the accounts of White House officials in August 2004. Mr. Kelner was uncertain whether the hold was consistently maintained from August 2004 to the present, but he asserted that for this period, the RNC does have a large volume of White House e-mails. According to Mr. Kelner, the hold would not have prevented individual White House officials from deleting their e-mail from the RNC server after August 2004.

Mr. Kelner's briefing raised particular concerns about Karl Rove, who according to press reports used his RNC account for 95% of of his communications. According to Mr. Kelner, although the hold started in August 2004, the RNC does not have any e-mails prior to 2005 for Mr. Rove. Mr. Kelner did not give any explanation for the e-mails missing from Mr. Rove's account, but he did acknowledge that one possible explanation is that Mr. Rove personally deleted his e-mails from the RNC server.

Mr. Kelner also explained that starting in 2005, the RNC began to treat Mr. Rove's emails in a special fashion. At some point in 2005, the RNC commenced an automatic archive policy for Mr. Rove, but not for any other White House officials. According to Mr. Kelner, this archive policy removed Mr. Rove's ability to personally delete his e-mails from the RNC server. Mr. Kelner did not provide many details about why this special policy was adopted for Mr. Rove. But he did indicate that one factor was the presence of investigative or discovery requests or other legal concerns. It was unclear from Mr. Kelner's briefing whether the special archiving policy for Mr. Rove was consistently in effect after 2005.

So the Republican National Committee had a plan of destroying White House emails on RNC servers from 2000 to 2003. In addition, the RNC provided certain White House officials the ability to delete their own emails from the RNC servers as recently as this month. This accounts for the 15 White House officials who have no email records on the RNC servers, who had RNC email accounts. One of those White House officials is Karl Rove. Rove uses his RNC account for 95 percent of his email communication.

Now in 2004, a "hold" was placed on the destruction of the RNC emails of these White House officials. Now TPM reports that one possible reason for this hold on the RNC emails may be the Patrick Fitzgerald investigation into the Valerie Plame scandal. And yet, this hold on the RNC emails would not have stopped Karl Rove from continuing to delete his own emails, even though Rove would have known about the hold, and that these emails were being saved by the RNC in cooperation with the Fitzgerald investigation. And what is more, the RNC never bothered to remove Rove's ability to delete his own emails from the RNC servers until after 2005, when the RNC adopted its archival policy on Rove's emails. It is very clear here--Karl Rove personally deleted his own emails from the RNC servers. And that would include any email letters regarding Fitzgerald's investigation of Rove's involvement in the Valerie Plame scandal.

In other words, this is outright obstruction of justice, committed by Karl Rove. And the Republican National Committee was complacent in allowing Rove, and perhaps other White officials (Can you say Vice President Dick Cheney?) to destroy evidence of their own involvement into the Valerie Plame scandal, and possibly other scandals here.