
Here (thanks to
Hoot of DU) is the incriminating email proving that the White House and Jack Abramoff used private email servers to bypass the law. If you can't read it, click on the image for a larger version.
Today's big news: House Oversight Chairman Henry Waxman has directed the RNC to preserve all emails involving White House officials. Waxman also asked the key question:
(5) What assurance can the RNC provide the Committee that no e-mails involving official White House business have been destroyed or altered.
The answer is obvious: None.
In the
expanded version of my piece on GWB43, I noted the RNC's server, Smartech, merged years ago with a company owned by Mercer Reynolds, George W. Bush's long-time friend and chief fundraiser. History is thus placed within purely partisan hands.
Smartech can claim that they deleted from their servers all emails pertinent to, say, White House involvement with the Jack Abramoff affair. Conceivably, new and exculpatory emails are being written and backdated at this very moment.
What to do? Get people under oath. Perhaps offers should be made to those involved with the Abramoff affair. And the Plame affair.
And the Mitchell Wade affair. Wade is the former head of MZM, the company which bribed "Duke" Cunningham. Waxman is also asking about that bizarre "furniture" contract Wade had with the White House. Does that interaction have an email trail...?
Laura Rozen received the following relevant message from a Congressional staffer:
"While this is an option not open to White House staff, because their servers block such programs, other Executive Branch officials in the various Cabinet Departments are also known to use the various free email programs like Hotmail and Yahoo to email sensitive issues. This is not necessarily because they are doing anything wrong, but because folks are aware that emails sent on the formal servers are archived forever and they do not want their emails to be dredged up months or years later – as is the case today with the Justice Department."
What can we do with this information? Simply this:
The folks normally in charge of White House procurement are surely on the "lower" level and must live with blocked access to outside email programs. So if the Wade deal were legit, any emails between Wade and the WH would be archived.
On the other hand, if all email pertinent to that transaction went through the RNC servers, then we know that we're talking about something other than furniture.