GOP Halts Effort to Retrieve White House E-Mails

Remember those White House email messages that were lost? White House officials including Karl Rove were using their RNC accounts instead of their White House accounts for official business. I think this violated the Hatch Act and some official records act that we're supposed to retain all government documents. Yesterday, Waxman's House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform had a hearing on Electronic Records Preservation at the White House.

The Washington Post reports GOP Halts Effort to Retrieve White House E-Mails "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."

Yeah, that important stuff Congress asked us to do because law might have been broken, we're not going to do it. Oh and how does it take months and months to search. You either have them or you don't. You find the backups and look. It should take a couple of of weeks at most.

There were also some statements filed about whether Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald got all the relevant email messages to his subpoena into the Plame investigation. "One problem: Even though White House computer technicians hunted high and low, an entire week's worth of e-mail from Cheney's office was missing. The week was Sept. 30, 2003, to Oct. 6, 2003, the opening days of the Justice Department's probe into whether anyone at the White House leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame." Yup no coincidence there.

This all just seems like obvious stonewalling to cover up laws that were broken. Just not responding to the subpoena and losing these messages and even using RNC accounts in the first place violates laws. But will there be any followup like any charges filed? I doubt it.

But of course Congress does want the DoJ to investigate Roger Clemens for perjury. We can't get that for anyone in the administration but a baseball pitcher that might have lied about steroids, now that's important.