thinkprogress.org — Karl Rove and other top officials have long been using RNC email accounts to go around the White House system, which automatically archives electronic communications. The White House has now announced that it simply lost an unknown number of these emails.
Apr 12, 2007 View in Crawl 4
charlotte_webApr 12, 2007
@avik42:Thanks for your graciousness. It's an exceedingly rare thing on Digg to see someone take an opposing view while treating the other person with dignity and respect.I'm sure they had some short-term backup tapes, in case the server crashed and they needed to restore it. However, the point that seems to be escaping a lot of people here is that the whole PURPOSE of setting up a separate email server was specifically that it would NOT be archived in any way, and thus not subject to being searched or subpoenaed by the opposition, because they were supposed to be discussing party business, tactics and strategies. The Clinton administration did the exact same thing, with a slightly different execution. As you see now, yes, the RNC email server will be subpoenaed by the opposition, and all of the party secrets (at least from the last 30 days) will be made known to the Democrats. In that sense, the Democrats will have gained a political victory.Most of the people here are ready to assume the worst, that President Bush and his aides used the RNC email server to regularly discuss hot political issues with the intent of subverting the archival process. That has yet to be proven. For example, show me threads of conversations about policy that were exclusively using RNC email addresses, and no WH email addresses (where the message would have been archived). If this is a simple mistake in usage policy, then you'll probably see that a lot of the emails have BOTH RNC and WH email addresses in them.
edrift101Apr 12, 2007
Can't wait for the RNC here in Minneapolis! Is Bush coming?
josepbaduApr 12, 2007
Had they been after that Mp3 on Nan's PC, they certainly would have found a way to retrieve it.
tmpoirierApr 12, 2007
I administer the email server here at my work. I will wait to see what/how many emails were lost before I jump over the technical aspects of cleaning an email system/user's system of all traces. I do call B.S. though.
sephariousApr 12, 2007
@InfamousAtheist I second that opinion, I'm just getting too tired to write out what would be a two or three page rant, citing six or seven other stories, to prove how utter terrible this Administration has been for America. hopefully the Dems will go for the jugular and take them to task.1-20-09...it's not that far away...assuming we don't get another jackass endorsed by the RNC's Rove sub-cabal. maybe the emails they do get from the server will reveal who they're really going to endorse.for the record: I dislike(mild word usage) BOTH parties, but anything the Dems do can't be worse then this kind of crap, and they are the only other viable option right now since both parties locked third parties out of the system decades ago. and for everyone who says "we have third parties, its a democracy!" I ask when was the last time we had a non-GOP, non-Dem President? the third parties can't even get into the "official" Presidential Debates, even when they're "officially" on the ballot. kinda messed up, but not surprising, given this one-party-two-faced system has engineered a process where they only lose power in ebbs and flows to each other in a surreal seasonal change kind of way. if you TRULY want change, if you REALLY believe that the politicians need to be sent a message, then strip them both of their power and vote in someone who isn't toeing a party line we've heard since before most of us were born. sad to think the last time we had some serious political party shake up was before the Civil War. I know as a matter of fact that most of you have been pissed off at either party through the last couple of decades (Nam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, Lewinsky, Iraq, etc, etc) and yet you just keep voting in the same people after a few years go by and you get pissed off with the other guys you voted in because you were pissed off at the first ones, cycle, rinse and repeat. wake up people, if you really want to shake up Washington, then voting in the Dems AGAIN isn't really going to change things, it's just going to be 1992 all over again.
swrostmoreApr 12, 2007
Sen. Leahy is a f**king true American Hero. I'm proud to be from VT with all the hell he is raising.
Closed AccountApr 12, 2007
@cartoonal:I agree that they've probably done worse. But one of the things that makes a scandal stick is simplicity. They've been able to wave their hands in various ways and cloud the issues for a lot of people on all of those other scandals. This one is very straightforward, and the best they've come up with so far is "the Democrats are just trying to steal our election plans," which nobody seems to be buying.Besides, cynicism and a lack of faith in the American people is what gets us the kind of s**tfest government we have now. I'm not naive, I'm just optimistic.
caffeinateApr 12, 2007
+10 Time to subpoena it all and start calling them on the lies. Having it in writing right in their faces is the only way they will admit to anything. They'll say "I don't remember", "I didn't know" and "I don't know" their favorite three unless there is explicit documentation in their own hands that they did in fact do it, say it and authorize it.
stepnw1fApr 12, 2007
Lol.... whine all you want. You'll see in the end and we'll be serving you crow when you do.
cybertron3Aug 8, 2007
-P Overwrite regular files before deleting them. Files are overwritten three times, first with the byte pattern 0xff, then 0x00, and then 0xff again, before they are deleted.