...and using outside e-mail accounts to avoid the Records Act also should not get a free pass

[jaunthie]

From the New York Times:

"Political advisers to President Bush may have improperly used their Republican National Committee (RNC) e-mail accounts to conduct official government business, and some communications that are required to be preserved under federal law may be lost as a result, White House officials said Wednesday.

Of the 1,000 White House officials with political duties, 22 — including Karl Rove, the chief political strategist — have Republican National Committee accounts that are supposed to be used only for campaign-related work. But recent revelations that some officials have used those accounts for Bush administration business, including discussions of a plan to dismiss United States attorneys, has prompted a Congressional investigation.

On Wednesday, Scott Stanzel, deputy White House press secretary, said the administration had recently begun its own inquiry, and had concluded that its policy governing political e-mail accounts was unclear, that the White House was not aggressive enough in monitoring political e-mail and that some people who had the accounts did not follow the policy closely enough.

As a result, Mr. Stanzel said, “some official e-mails have potentially been lost.”"

For a really nice rundown on this issue and why the "we just weren't clear enough to our staff" White House talking point is complete bullpoop, check out Dan Froomkin's article in today's Washington Post.

Raise your hand if you believe that either the White House employees' use of the RNC accounts to avoid keeping records (as required by law, government e-mail accounts are backed up and all emails kept as part of the record) was accidental, or that these RNC emails were accidentally lost. Mighty convenient, those emails going missing just as Congress is targeting them as part of the US Attorneys firing investigation.

Of course, whether the US Attorney firings were legal or not, the use of those accounts most definitely wasn't. That clearly is breaking the law. I wonder if anyone's going to have the chutzpah to prosecute?

Edited to add: Well, apparently the congressional committee has enough chutzpah to issue subpoenas, anyway. It's a start.