From ThinkProgress via TPM MuckRaker:
Multiple congressional investigations have uncovered evidence that White House appointees regularly communicate using email accounts provided by the Republican Party. As CREW has argued, such activity violates the Presidential Records Act, which requires the White House to preserve such records.
Today, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) issued letters to the Republican National Committee and the Bush-Cheney ‘04 Campaign directing them to preserve all emails by and for White House officials, and to meet with the committee about the legal issues involved in conducting official government business using partisan email accounts.
On its face, this is pretty bad. Republicans these days don't like it, but one of the most important principles upon which our nation is built is that of the informed electorate. Pursuant to this principle we have all sorts of laws and regulations that ensure that the public can get information about what the government is getting up to.
Now of course there should be (and are) limits. It's absolutely true that presidential advisors need to be able to have candid conversations with one another, and the president. And I don't think anyone really believes that every email sent to or from whitehouse.gov should be made public immediately. But it should be eventually - that's why we have the Presidential Records Act. Eventually all of the information is made public. This is a good thing - if for no other reason than it provides historians with a wealth of material with which they can do their jobs.
But it's also a good thing because government should not operate in the dark. People ought to know what's going on with those who they have elected to lead them. Thomas Jefferson said it best: "Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government;... whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights."
Lots of times people use this quote as a way of lamenting the state our current soundbite politics. But it also means that in order for people to govern themselves they must be made aware of what is going on.
The Bush administration and its Republican allies stand stalwartly against this principle. They do not want the people to be well informed because the people would then make good decisions about governing themselves. I've resisted the shrillness of Bush opponents over the past six years - while I think the guy has done a terrible job with our country I've never gone so far as to believe he's an outright lawbreaker. But the volume of evidence that's come out over the past month has convinced me otherwise. At the very least, I'm fairly certain that high level officials in the administration have commited crimes. It looks increasingly likely that there was a deliberate effort to use the Justice Department to protect political allies while harming political enemies.
I'm sure you've all seen the news lately - last week the House and Senate Judiciary Committees voted to empower their chairmen to subpoena senior White House officials, including Karl Rove. Bush has vowed to fight this; using Executive Privilege as his defense. To wit, he argues that in order for the White House to function smoothly he needs to be able to recieve candid advice from advisors who won't be afraid that what they way will be dragged out before Congress later on. He also makes the claim - echoed by his supporters - that this is nothing more than a fishing expedition; that the firing of 7 US attorneys was entirely routine and that there is no reason to believe anything untoward happened.
Of course that's all a load of crap. Executive Privilege doesn't allow the President to cover up criminal activites. And in this case, every reasonable person in the country is suspecting that something criminal has occured. At the very last DOJ officials lied to Congress, which is in and of itself a crime. Alberto Gonzalez himself said he wasn't closely involved in the US Attorney purge, a statement that subsequently released documents effectively contradict. DOJ officials also claimed that the White House wasn't involved in the firings, which has also been shown to be false - both Harriet Meiers and Karl Rove were deeply involved with the process.
And it needs to be said and said again - by all appearances at least one of these attorneys was fired to put the kibosh on her investigation. Carol Lam was responsible for putting Duke Cunningham behind bars in the biggest Congressional corruption case in decades. She was continuing that investigation and it was taking her toward the CIA, which at its top was full of Bush cronies. The director of the CIA resigned over it. Three days later the #3 guy at the CIA - Dusty Foggo - resigned after it was made known he was a target. Other Republican Congressmen were implicated. Word is the investigation was heading into the DoD as well. This was an enormous web of corruption, and it really looks as if Lam was fired to prevent it from being exposed.
US Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president. That means he can fire them at any time. But that doesn't mean he can fire them for any reason. If an attorney is fired to stymie an investigation - any investigation - that's a felony. If the President was the one who made the decision, that makes him guilty of obstruction of justice. Richard Nixon was brought down over this very charge. And that's not the only paralell to the situation we find ourselves in today.
This isn't a fishing expedition. This isn't a matter of Democrats just looking to catch someone in an accidental lie. The lies have already happened, and they weren't accidental. The lies were about conduct that looks very similar to obstruction of justice, and using the Justice Department as a political tool. The Bush administration plans to hide behind Executive Privilege to prevent Congress and the American public from finding out what's going on. This is exactly what Richard Nixon did. It won't work.
This brings me back to what started this post. It turns out that maybe the administration was a bit too clever for its own good, as it's very unlikely that Executive Privilege can be invoked to prevent the disclosure of emails sent over a private email account. The House Oversight Committee has already ordered the RNC to preserve all of those emails, and that opens the door for Congress to subpoena them. And since they're emails sent over a private email account, it's not very likely that Executive Privilege can cover them. Oops!
