GOP Issues a Warning on E-mail Probe
Roll Call Staff
As Democrats gear up for a broad investigation of Republican e-mail accounts, GOP staff warn that the issue could come back to haunt Democrats, as the minority is looking for ways to extend the issue into Democratic e-mails as well.
The revelation that top White House officials, including Karl Rove, may have conducted official government business over Republican National Committee e-mail accounts has launched a broad series of inquiries among Democrats trying to get their hands on some of these messages.
House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) has called a meeting for Wednesday to consider issuing a subpoena to the RNC to force the committee to produce information about these e-mail accounts dating back as far as 2001. Waxman also has asked federal agencies to preserve any e-mails they have received from these accounts. The Democratic National Committee has filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Justice Department, seeking communications between Justice officials and anyone using an RNC e-mail account regarding the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. Last week the DNC filed suit against the department for failing to timely respond to the FOIA request.
But Brian McNicoll, a spokesman for Oversight and Government Reform Committee Republicans, warned that if Democrats want to broadly investigate the use of party e-mail accounts by administration officials, Republicans could extend this investigation back to the end of the Clinton administration as well.
“If you can go back through five years of e-mails, you can go back 10 years of e-mails,” McNicoll said. “The Clinton administration was doing this too — they were using e-mail accounts that were outside the presidential records system,” the system that requires preservation of official White House communications. Republicans are “looking into” the possibility of sweeping some of this activity into the Waxman investigation, he said.
David Marin, the committee’s Republican staff director, said in an e-mail, “It’s our hope that none of the threatened subpoenas is actually issued come Wednesday, since they all deal with yesterday’s news, or matters in which the would-be targets are cooperating fully with Chairman Waxman, or both. Regardless, we’ll be ready to help set the record straight on Wednesday.”
Waxman’s decision to call for subpoenas followed an April 18 letter from RNC attorney Robert Kelner, which said the party is taking steps to preserve e-mails and is working with Waxman’s staff and the White House to sort out a timeline for producing documents and vetting them for potential executive privilege concerns. “We would again respectfully caution against premature, inflammatory, and potentially misleading assertions by the Committee concerning whether e-mails may have been preserved for any particular period or person.”
Outside experts suggest that any Congressional investigation into misuse of e-mail accounts could be fraught with peril for members of Congress and their staff, who must assiduously separate official from political communications.
In the era of the constant campaign, both Members and staffers use e-mail to communicate with their own campaign committees, as well as their parties’ campaign arms like the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. However, there are no rules governing the retention of such e-mails, according to senior House and Senate aides. If they are retained, that is done according to offices’ individual policies.
But unlike the White House system, aides to these party committees said no staffers, not even senior aides, have been assigned e-mail addresses at the campaign offices with a dccc.com domain. The lawmakers in charge of the committees, however, may have DCCC or NRSC e-mail addresses that they use while working out of those buildings.
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