Dems Believe They Have a Right to GOP Emails

I can't believe the Bush administration has done such a ham-handed job of handling the firing of the U.S. Attorneys. From the beginning the line should have been "we have a right to change U.S. Attorneys at any time and we're not going to discuss personnel decisions". Instead, they trotted out different Justice Department employees with different stories and have now created a giant mess.

The Dems have now decided that since a number of White House employees had both White House and Republican National Committee email accounts, the Dems should have a right to search through RNC email to find information on the firings.

A lawyer for the Republican National Committee told congressional staff members yesterday that the RNC is missing at least four years' worth of e-mail from White House senior adviser Karl Rove that is being sought as part of investigations into the Bush administration, according to the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

GOP officials took issue with Rep. Henry Waxman's account of the briefing and said they still hope to find the e-mail as they conduct forensic work on their computer equipment. But they acknowledged that they took action to prevent Rove -- and Rove alone among the two dozen or so White House officials with RNC accounts -- from deleting his e-mails from the RNC server. Waxman (D-Calif.) said he was told the RNC made that move in 2005.

In a letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, Waxman said the RNC lawyer, Rob Kelner, also raised the possibility that Rove had personally deleted the missing e-mails, all dating back to before 2005. GOP officials said Kelner was merely speaking hypothetically about why e-mail might be missing for any staffer and not referring to Rove in particular.

The disclosures helped fan the controversy over what the White House has acknowledged to be the improper use of political e-mail accounts to conduct official government business.

For one party, whether in the guise of an investigation or not, to be allowed to read through the email communications of an opposing party, gives the party seeking the information the right to effectively "read the playbook" of their opposition, and that shouldn't be allowed to happen in a democracy. If Rove used his RNC account to conduct White House business, that shouldn't have been done, but without any underlying crime to which those emails could be connected, the RNC must refuse to produce them. It was not a crime to fire the U.S. Attorneys, even if done for political reasons, and to release political email to the opposition without first demonstrating criminal conduct creates a dangerous precedent.