Reply #37: WA POST: Casual Lawbreaking at the White House = By Dan Froomkin [View All]

Casual Lawbreaking at the White House
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, June 19, 2007; 1:14 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/06/19/BL2007061900924.html

New evidence unearthed by House Democrats establishes that White House political adviser Karl Rove and many of his colleagues used Republican National Committee e-mail accounts for official business -- even though White House policy is clear that doing so is a violation of the Presidential Records Act.

How did such casual lawbreaking come to be so widespread? And why was it tolerated? Those are among the questions the White House has yet to answer satisfactorily.

One reason for Rove's use of the RNC e-mail account would appear to be convenience.....

Another reason, suggested by White House spokesman Scott Stanzel in April, is that some people may have used their non-government accounts for official business due to "an abundance of caution" in order to avoid violating the Hatch Act...

Yet another possibility, of course, is that Rove and the others chose to use the RNC e-mail accounts for official business as a way to keep their e-mail from public scrutiny ... they appear to have succeeded ... RNC automatically deleted most e-mails after 30 days and allowed users to manually delete whatever they felt like. The result, as I first reported in April (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/04/12/BL2007041200941.html), is that countless White House e-mails are now missing .