WASHINGTON - President Bush's aides are lying about White House e-mails sent on a Republican account that might have been lost, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy suggested Thursday, vowing to subpoena those documents if the administration fails to cough them up.
"They say they have not been preserved. I don't believe that!" Leahy shouted from the Senate floor.
"You can't erase e-mails, not today. They've gone through too many servers," said Leahy, D-Vt. "Those e-mails are there, they just don't want to produce them. We'll subpoena them if necessary."
White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said there is no effort to purposely keep the e-mails under wraps, and that the counsel's office is doing everything it can to recover any that were lost.
"The purpose of our review is to make every reasonable effort to recover potentially lost e-mails, and that is why we've been in contact with forensic experts," he said.
Leahy scoffed.
"I've got a teenage kid in my neighborhood that can go get 'em for them," he told reporters later.
Senate Democrats continued to toughen their stance against the White House over the firings of eight prosecutors over the winter.
After his speech, Leahy's committee approved - but did not issue - new subpoenas to compel the administration to produce documents and testimony about the firings.
Democrats say the firings might have been improper, but that probe yielded a weightier question: Whether White House officials such as political adviser Karl Rove are intentionally conducting sensitive official presidential business via non-governmental accounts to evade a law requiring preservation - and eventual disclosure - of presidential records.
I am just amazed at the outright lies this Bush administration keeps telling the American people here. When you have White House aids, such as Karl Rove, using a Republican-sponsored email system and RNC-provided laptop computers as a means to avoid any type of congressional oversight into this administration. The corruption runs deep into this administration, which makes the Nixon administration's Watergate scandal seem like a church picnic. It is all about not leaving any type of paper or electronic trail--this administration doesn't want any records of illegal activities to be revealed. Consider this McClatchy story:
WASHINGTON - White House officials said Wednesday that some presidential aides may have improperly used a back-channel e-mail system to conduct government business.
A conference call that was intended to clear up questions about the use of a Republican Party-sponsored e-mail system at the White House, however, left many questions unanswered. It's still unclear whether White House aides used the outside e-mail system to try to keep their communications secret and how many e-mails might have gone astray.
Some communications that have come to light suggest that officials may have used the outside system to conceal some of their communications.
"I now have an RNC blackberry which you can use to e-mail me any time. No security issues like my WH email," Susan Ralston, a former Rove aide, told now-disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff in a 2001 e-mail.
White House officials were unable to say whether e-mails sent through the outside system could be retrieved. Congressional investigators want to see any back-channel e-mails that might shed light on the firings of eight U.S. attorneys last year.
No security issues like my WH email. No electronic trail. This allows Ralson to conduct whatever illegal or corrupt activities she wants to for this Bush White House. All for the accumulation of power, money, one political party domination of the government. It really doesn't matter what the reason for these illegal activities are. What matters is that this is an administration that will do anything it can to maintain absolute power that it has accumulated over the past seven years.
That is what this scandal is really about.
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