Great, now the rethuglicans are apparently missing a bunch of emails that pertain to the dismissal of the eight US attorneys -- sort of like Nixon's "18 minute gap" in the White House telephone conversation tape recordings. But Senator Patrick Leahy, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, will not be ignored: he threatened further action in response to the news. "Those e-mails are there, they just don't want to produce them," he said. "We'll subpoena them if necessary."
At issue is how the White House complies with two seemingly competing laws. One is the 1978 Presidential Records Act, which requires the administration to ensure that its decisions and deliberations are "adequately documented" and that records flowing out of those decisions are preserved.
The other is the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal officials from engaging in political business on government time.
In order to comply with the Hatch act, the Clinton administration also permitted certain officials to hold dual e-mail accounts. But Bush White House officials say theirs is the first administration to operate in the era of instant communications.
They say compliance has grown more complicated, and the White House rules have not kept pace with technology. As a result of their review, Mr. Stanzel and the senior official said the White House has put into effect a policy requiring, among other things, that officials with national committee e-mail accounts obtain permission for those accounts from the White House counsel's office.
Read more about it in the NYTimes story.
Also read the WSJ piece about private email accounts being used in the White House to avoid public scrutiny.
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Echelon (or whatever the current instantiation of Total Information Awareness is being called) can retrieve all the emails from archives. Refer them to sffca.ip.att.net, through which all US traffic and much foreign Internet traffic is routed.
hopefully, the IT staff in the White House are aware of this.