This should not surprise anyone:
After promising last year to search its computers for tens of thousands of e-mails sent by White House officials, the Republican National Committee has informed a House committee that it no longer plans to retrieve the communications by restoring computer backup tapes, the panel’s chairman said yesterday.
The move increases the likelihood that an untold number of RNC e-mails dealing with official White House business during the first term of the Bush administration — including many sent or received by former presidential adviser Karl Rove — will never be recovered, said House Democrats and public records advocates.
The RNC had previously told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that it was attempting to restore e-mails from 2001 to 2003, when the RNC had a policy of purging all e-mails, including those to and from White House officials, after 30 days. But Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) disclosed during a hearing yesterday that the RNC has now said it “has no intention of trying to restore the missing White House e-mails.”
They don’t even care, and are busy going about the job of DWTFTW.
cleek
time to print off another copy of SternlyWordedLetter.doc
Mr Furious
LOL! good one cleek.
Waxman’s response should be, “Fine, give us the tapes, WE’LL restore them.” “Now.”
Jake
Nixon 2.0.
Gus
I’m shocked, shocked…oh, I guess I’m not.
Svensker
There’s no underlying crime, so how could there be a cover-up?
Bobzim
Do they take the hard drives/computers when they leave? Any chance a new admin could do the search?
Myrtle Parker
If Waxman subpoenas the tapes himself, the RNC will refuse to honor the subpoena claiming executive privilege on behalf of the President. Justice Dept. will concur. Waxman is then left with… nothing.
Until the congress decides to use their enforcement powers, the executive and their friends will continue to tell them to go fuck themselves.
zsa
What’s alarming is the prospect of political party A regaining power and finding it necessary to investigate, prosecute, and jail a good number of members from political party B.
It’s a warning sign as to the health of the Republic, but what choice is there? The RNC response here is the legal equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting “la-la-la, I can’t hear you”.
So President Obama or Clinton is going to have to peel the rotting onion of Republican lies and corruption. It’s not gonna be pretty, but it is gonna be necessary. The GOP is infested with maggots. It needs a lot of sunlight and more than a little bleach to clear this up. A lot of these people are going to jail. A lot more need to be driven from the political sphere in disgrace.
It’s just unfortunate that it’s the opposition party that has to do it … it would be far better if the GOP would police its’ own. Where are the moderate, principled conservative Republicans? And more importantly, where are their balls?
Buckley didn’t die because he’s an old motherfucker. Buckley died of a broken heart.
jrg
Possession is 9/10ths of the law. I guess chimpy did learn something while he was getting coked up until his 40s.
The RNC sure is jumping through hoops to make sure none of this info sees the light of day. How much do you want to bet these emails tie the Iraq war to the Bush admin’s political or financial ambitions?
Conservatively Liberal
History is not going to be kind to Chimpy, and things like this will just be one more black mark. History is not going to be kind to the Democrats for rolling over and playing dead when they were needed the most either.
Cheney learned his lesson with Nixon, and he made sure that all pertinent records were destroyed. No recordings, no emails, nothing that can be tied back to anyone, so nothing wrong was done, right? Probably the most criminal of administrations in our history, and they will get away with everything.
It would not surprise me one bit if more than a few Democrats are happy that nothing can be done about this as it helps to hide their complicity (silent or not) in this whole mess. I think that the Democrats just want the whole thing to go away. No matter how you slice it, they let the ball drop in the name of saving their bacon come reelection. Few of them had our country as their top priority, and it shows.
We all lost something here, and I am not sure that we will ever get it back.
rawshark
The best part which I read about the other day was that there was no mechanism for preventing old emails from being modified.
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
Yes, but what silences that alarm is the apparent lack of vertebrae in so-called “party A”
In fact, if “party A” had “party B’s” lack of shame, they would have broken in a month ago and confiscated the servers by force, without a warrant, and then justifying loudly that the current FISA law allows for it. The people would hardly care, if they could figure out “party A” was lying.
I’m not sure I’d want that… but… but… arrrrrrgh!
Must. Destroy. Current. Republicans!
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
Fixed for temporal issues. Namely, the white-washing of domestic history.
Everything else in your post was correct, though.
Egilsson
Svensker, you are wrong buddy. There’s lots of laws that govern preservation of presidential documentations, and all those White House emails qualify – and routing national business through the RNC (1) does not negate that statutory obligation and (2) represents a separate infraction.
Then there’s (3), which involves all the lying and obstruction into this lawbreaking.
TheFountainHead
Yeah, what no one seems to be getting at is that whether we get the tapes or not is irrelevant. There’s nothing on them that will do us any good, and then they’re going to turn that around and say, “See you’ve been prosecuting this for absolutely no reason and wasting your legislative time, while WE’VE been trying to win the war in Iraq!”
Bubblegum Tate
Yes, but by investigating GOP malfeasance, the Democrats are engaging in purely partisan witchhunts, and the GOP shouldn’t have to comply with such ridiculousness.
Fuck…I tried to be hyperbolic above, but it just sounds like the actual wingnutosphere defense line.
crw
Moreover, the penalties for destroying evidence/obstruction of justice are a lot lighter than the penalties for the original crimes (not to mention they hold things up just long enough to avoid impeachment). Both politically and legally. So they get the slap on the wrist and maybe (maybe) a few months in the pokey, then they move straight into Wingnut Welfare in the think tanks.
It’s the Scooter Libby gambit writ large.
Dennis - SGMM
Presidents are loath to push the prosecution of their predecessors or of their appointees and staff. If the Congress or the current president’s DOJ doesn’t act then that’s it, folks. Some members of the Nixon administration were doubtless indictable, the same with Reagan and yet nothing was done. This will become a dead letter in January, 2009, no matter who is elected.
Davebo
All of you emails are belonging to us!
The Other Steve
One of the first things I remember when GW Bush took office was an announcement that he was going to have to abandon using email, which he’d been using to keep in touch with his good friend brother Jeb and such.
By 2001 everybody understood the value of email in litigation. It’d come to the forefront in the late 1990s in a series of trials against Microsoft.
What everybody learned was… don’t send anything important over email, and above all don’t save copies.
I seriously doubts the RNC even has backup tapes. What would be the point?
Companies keep this stuff around, because they are required by law, and by threat of being sued.
But the RNC knows that it is immune from any prosecution.
Jill
This is what happens when you have people in Congress who don’t have a fucking clue about technology. Subpoena those hard disks and take them to one of those outfits that restores lost files. Done.
The Other Steve
Agreed. The problem with trying to investigate/indict the previous administration is that it ties up all the staff of the present admin. It’s better to just let it drop, and when the time comes release all the Presidential papers to historians who won’t be kind.
jcricket
It’s actually a complete embrace of “corporate attitudes” by the Republican party – that loves them some corporations. Big corporations spend inordinate amounts of money intentionally evading the law, and tying up the legal system. They do this, because their profits are so large and the penalties so small, it’s just a “cost of doing business”.
Time to up the penalties. Get caught deleting emails? Jail. Obstruct justice in a federal case? 10 years + millions in fines.
Not gonna stop people, but let’s just start putting them behind bars and fining them millions. I don’t care if all the RNC funds are tied up defending themselves legally for the next 20 years – and honestly, I don’t even care if we get convictions. That’s money and time they can’t spend running candidates for office.
myiq2xu
In that “man-sized” safe in Cheney’s office.
This is the RNC, not Delta Bush House, although it’s easy to make that mistake, they can’t tell themselves apart.
But to answer your question anyway: You don’t think they still exist do you?
They were given to Oroku Saki, the official White House archivist.
myiq2xu
Fixt
Sorry
Bruce Moomaw
We can now add today’s entirely new story from NBC.
Yup, politicians did learn one crucial lesson from Watergate: destroy all the records. If you do that, no one can ever touch you legally, thanks to the misdesigned structure of our Constitution — which, from the very start, never did work the way the Framers intended it to, thanks to their cretinous mistake in assuming that political parties never would exist.
jcricket
And claim executive privilege/state’s secrets for anything where records exist.
It’s really the perfect closed system, isn’t it. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out. Except somehow we all end up f’ed.
Z
Oh please! Accountability is for peasants!
Xenos
A simple solution, really — Independent Prosecutor authorised by statute. Staff it with seasoned, honest republicans like Patrick Fitzgerald and Grant Woods. These guys are outnumbered by dishonest criminal hacks, but it will be the last chance to save their party, so I expect they could be pretty zealous about cleaning it up.
There are honest republicans out there – they are just not anywhere near the centers of GOP power at this time.
bartkid
Yet another reason to be disappointed in America’s youth.
Where are today’s 12-year-old haxxers who could crack the RNC servers overnight and publish these emails on /.?
Sigh.
jcricket
Which, if we want to think strategically, is good for Dems (I’m serious). What’s the Republican party doing to ensure its survival? I think one of the things they don’t realize is that their current actions are destroying their candidate “pipeline”.
Think about it, if you’re a “fiscally conservative but reasonable” person, and thinking of running for office anywhere outside of a very rural area – are you going to embrace to the party of Malkin, Rush, Savage, Gingrich, Lott & Delay? Or are you going to consider a run as a “conservative” Democrat? If you don’t hate gays, if you believe in evolution, if you don’t believe abortion needs to be illegal – why again would you run as a Republican?
Except for attracting more corrupt, morally bankrupt, authoritarian/racist types, I think the Republican party is going to have a pretty thin bench to draw candidates from in the next 10-15 years. This needn’t be a permanent problem, but I don’t see Republicans rushing to reverse their embrace of yesteryear.
Jake
Fxd.
Aaron
Patrick Fitzgerald sucks. He does one pro forma prosecution and everyone thinks he’s the second coming. Scooter libby lied on the stand. Now that he’s been pardoned, put him back on the stand and ask him again. If he gives the same bullshit answer’s bring contempt charges against him. Prosecute him for the new lies, again!
Put Dick Cheney on the stand. So what if this gives him immunity, he’s getting away with it anyway, and at least we’ll find out the truth!
Patrick Fitzgerald my ass.
David Moisan
I always thought the backup tapes were in a landfill. Any landfills in VA or MD to look through? Their inventory lists can be subpoenaed, no?
chek
This doesn’t even make sense.
I work in a IT shop, mostly dealing with backups all day long. We have insane retention periods for our backup media, tapes are preserved permanently, we recall them monthly to duplicate them even. The reason for this is of course Sarbanes-Oxley. I can’t believe that the presidential records act could be less stringent than that?
There is too the question of routing official business through other computer systems as a way to avoid audits and discovery, where I work that would get you walked out the door in handcuffs!
Anyway, backup software is backup software. Waxman should demand these tapes be turned over to the Judiciary Committee and the tapes be recovered by an auditing firm. Believe me, nothing is ever really lost for good. There are tons of businesses out there that know how to recover data that people really wish was gone.
Asti
Probably behind security fences at the Aberdeen Proving Ground.
TenguPhule
There is a very simple solution to this.
Round up every Republican in the RNC and put them in one room.
Pick one at random and shoot them in the head.
Announce to the rest that the first one to confess and provide evidence gets to live.
TenguPhule
Corrected.