Last October, Dubya said
“I tend not to email or — not only tend not to email, I don’t email, because of the different record requests that can happen to a president. I don’t want to receive emails because, you know, there’s no telling what somebody’s email may — it would show up as, you know, a part of some kind of a story, and I wouldn’t be able to say, `Well, I didn’t read the email.’ `But I sent it to your address, how can you say you didn’t?’ So, in other words, I’m very cautious about emailing.”
Now he's hooked on using a Blackberry.
Keep that in mind as you read this, which I steal from The Progress Report because I know they won't care if I do.
E-mail Evasion
President Bush has consistently attempted to weaken the Presidential Records Act (PRA), which was intended to open presidential documents to the public after a period of no more than 12 years. It was passed in 1978, after Watergate, "to underscore the fact that presidential records belong to the American people, not to the president," notes Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA). But after 2001, Bush issued a decree that now allows "former presidents and their heirs to bar the release of documents for almost any reason." He has promised to veto any attempt to return to the bill's original intent. Recent revelations in the Bush administration's firing of eight U.S. attorneys shed new light on another way the White House has been deliberately evading the PRA -- by using political, non-government e-mail addresses to correspond with one another. Since the White House system automatically keeps records of all e-mails, Bush administration officials -- including Karl Rove -- are using accounts provided by the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign to dodge public oversight. Unfortunately, after Waxman notified these groups to begin preserving all e-mails by and from White House officials, administration staffers started looking for new ways to hide presidential records from public scrutiny.
AVOIDING_OVRESIGHT@GWB43.COM: The easiest way to reach a White House official may not be through a White House e-mail address. Rove does "about 95 percent" of his e-mailing using his RNC-based account. Many other aides in the Political Affairs Office "use the RNC account as an alternative to their official government e-mail addresses to help keep their official and political duties separate." Susan Ralston, Rove's former assistant, used not only an RNC account, but also accounts at georgebush.com and aol.com to communicate White House information with lobbyist Jack Abramoff. At one point, an Abramoff aide noted that Ralston told him to e-mail her at her political account because "it is better to not put this stuff in writing in [the White House] ... email system because it might actually limit what they can do to help us, especially since there could be lawsuits, etc." E-mails show that Rove's deputy, J. Scott Jennings, used a political e-mail address -- SJennings@gwb43.com -- to help orchestrate the prosecutor purge. Even former President George H.W. Bush said his son, the current president, spurns e-mailing because the records could be subpoenaed. But the White House e-mail system has been crafted to comply with the PRA. It "automatically copies all messages created by staff and sends them to the White House Office of Records Management for archiving." By avoiding the White House e-mail system, the Bush administration has raised serious questions about "whether it is taking all necessary steps to maintain presidential records to provide a full accounting of all activities" during Bush's tenure.
