This report discloses something I didn't know before -- that the government seems to have used emails intercepted without a warrant to mount a case against a guy selling a "male enhancement" product. The issue here has nothing to do with the question of whether this fellow is a con artist or a quack. The issue has to do with whether the war on terror has been used as an excuse to gut our right to privacy. A guy selling a boner extender (even a fake boner extender) may be called many things, but "terrorist" is not one of them.
Compare that tale to the latest outrage from the White House:
The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), wants to get its hands on those RNC-issued email accounts used by Karl Rove and other White House personnel. Congressional investigators want to know about Rove's and his deputy's involvement in the U.S. attorney firings. But the White House insists that it review the emails first, before handing anything over to Democrats. Last week, Conyers warned the RNC not to do that, saying that it would be "an unjustified delay" and "potentially... an obstruction of our investigation."So. First we were told that the emails sent through the RNC were purely partisan, that those accounts were used only to insure compliance with the Hatch Act.
And today, in a letter to the RNC, the White House made their position clear: you have to give them to us first. There "exists a clear and indisputable Executive Branch interest" in the emails on the RNC-issued accounts, wrote Emmet Flood, Special Counsel to the President.
Now we are told that those emails are an official executive branch "thing," and thus protected by executive privilege.
Bottom line: Bush thinks he can read your email, but you can't read his.
4 comments:
Claiming that there is "a clear and indisputable Executive Branch interest" is not the same thing as claiming executive privilege, but it is intended to imply that. It is, I think, a threat and a bluff.
It is impossible to see how all this will play out, but certainly it is not hard to imagine that there will ultimately have to be a Supreme Court ruling on whether RNC server e-mails are entitled to executive privilege. It will be interesting to see how Alito and Roberts position themselves on it.
If the NSA has been reading ALL of our emails, then they must also be reading and have been reading ALL of the WH's emails regardless of whether they were originated on WH or RNC email servers.
All congress needs to do is to subpeona the missing emails from the NSA, they have all of our emails.
Has anyone thought of this?
Obviously, the White House thinks that the emails can be retrieved -- which is precisely WHY they are claiming executive privilege. They wouldn't bother making such a dodgy claim if they felt secure in the knowledge that the evidence was gone for good.
And now Blackberry has gone down in all of North America? Rather coincidental...
Miss P.
Post a Comment