Even for White House as toxic and vile as George W. Bush’s sixth year in office, the revelation on April 12, 2007 seemed shocking. Responding to congressional demands for emails in connection with its investigation into the partisan firing of eight U.S. attorneys, the White House announced that as many as five million emails, covering a two-year span, had been “lost”, (OR: “deleted”, a violation of the Presidential Records Act).
Not long after George W. Bush assumed the presidency in 2001, potato head Karl Rove, his top political aide, set up a private email server for use in the White House. The stated purpose of the system — the primary domain name on which was gwb43.com — was that it would be used exclusively for the sort of political correspondence that Bush and Rove were not permitted to do on the taxpayer’s dime. Congressional investigators knew that this private server was being used for government business, including to discuss the firing of one of the U.S. attorneys. The RNC accounts were used by 22 White House staffers, including then-Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, who reportedly used his RNC email for 95 percent of his communications.
Seven years later, Bush and Rove were embroiled in two competing scandals — the Valerie Plame scandal, in which operatives for Dick Cheney, including Rove and Scooter Libby, were accused of unmasking Valerie Plame, a CIA specialist in the black market for weapons of mass destruction, for purely partisan reasons, (TREASON), and the U.S. Attorney purge, in which Rove operatives ordered Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to purge eight U.S. attorneys who were qualified prosecutors and replace them with political hacks with little or no prosecutorial experience.
Rove skated in the Libby case, but Scooter was convicted (Bush quickly commuted the sentence), on March 6, 2007, at the same time Bush and Rove were under fire for purging the U.S. attorneys. During the investigation, it came to light that Rove’s server had been used to send official, non-political emails — correspondence that was required by law to be preserved under the Presidential Records Act. Rove’s operation admitted that it had deleted at least 5 million emails from the server.
ASIDE: GOP IT “Guru” Mike Connell was blamed/credited for being behind the Secret Rove Email Scam, as well as the mishigosh surrounding the 2004 election tally in Ohio. Then Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell had a contract with Connell for IT work on the infamous Election Night 2004, giving Connell “remote monitoring capabilities” to the computer counting Ohio’s presidential vote, allowing Connell’s private, partisan external third party company and a subcontractor to have unfettered secret access to Ohio’s vote tally. On the night of the 2004 election, bizarre discrepancies between exit polls, which showed John Kerry winning handily, and the tabulated results, flipped. Without the machine hacking, Buckeye State’s 20 electoral votes would have given Kerry the presidency.
In 2008, election protection attorneys and others appeared to be closing in on critical irregularities and illegalities. Connell was now on the McCain/Palin payroll. He was deposed one day before the 2008 election about his actions during the 2004 vote count and his access to Karl Rove’s email files and how they went missing and was set to testify in the election tampering case. He was killed in a freak small plane crash in December of 2008, a few months after Karl Rove threatened him, telling him that if Connell didn’t “take the fall” Rove would go after his wife for “lobbying processes”. Velvet Revolution, a non-profit investigating Connell’s activities, revealed that Connell had said he was afraid George Bush and Dick Cheney would “throw [him] under the bus.” Attorney Cliff Arnebeck had also previously alerted Attorney General Michael Mukasey to alleged threats from Karl Rove to Connell if he refused to “take the fall.” The cause of the crash is unknown, and it remains under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board. Life is weird! (Death, too.)
ASIDE ASIDE: In May of 2012, a catastrophic miscarriage of justice took place in the South Bronx tens of thousands of votes were lost in the 2010 races for both Senate seats and and the Governor’s mansion (luckily South Bronx is full of Poors). In response to the very serious problem of the losing of 30% of votes cast, the state Board of Election and the electronic voting machines’ manufacturer ES&S (née Diebold) assembled a crack team of experts to figure out what went wrong and they came up with this:
There’s some kind of defect in these machines that when they overheat they can create what they’re calling phantom votes,” said Larry Norden, a deputy director with the Brennan Center.
You know, sometimes my computer starts to overheat. Sometimes it shuts down. Sometimes applications die. I have never once seen my computer malfunction such that the a very limited and targeted segment memory was corrupted in such a way that the application was otherwise stable except for a few key variables.
Anyhoo, in 2009, two Washington, D.C. watchdog groups sued the White House for the release of the mysteriously vanishing, obviously incriminating records of daily operations under Bush/Cheney, and whaddya know, “lost” doesn’t mean “lost” and delete doesn’t always mean delete. The emails run from 2003 to 2005, covering some of Bush’s biggest scandals and decisions, from the outing of Valerie Plame to the early days of the Iraq War. In 2009, some “White House contractors” located 22 million emails missing from the Bush Administration’s eight-year crime spree, probably on a thumb drive in a condom in Alberto Gonzales’ anal cavity. Once cleansed by technicians at the National Archives, all references to plotting and perpetuating 9/11, Iraq, Katrina and the assassination of Dumbledore will be wiped. We will not see all the emails from that period restored, only thse from 94 specific dates, some of which were chosen at random. The Washington Post reports that this is because restoring the emails from old backup tapes is an expensive and time-consuming process.
Kickstarter to release them all, please.
Under federal law, the White House is required to maintain records, including e-mails, involving presidential decision- making and deliberations. But suddenly millions of the private RNC emails had gone missing; emails that were seen as potentially crucial evidence by Congressional investigators.
The White House email story broke on a Wednesday. Yet on that Sunday’s Meet The Press, Face The Nation, and Fox News Sunday, the topic of millions of missing White House emails did not come up. At all. Fox News seemed utterly uninterested in the Bush email SCANDAL. Fox News contributor and gay basher was quoted as saying “deleted emails? who cares?’ and one other mention simply accused Democrats of engineering a “fishing expedition.” That was all.
Republicans are wielding power much the same way they did then when they controlled the White House and Congress under George W. Bush: ineptly — examples: 1, 2 etc. 2007, when Congress asked the Bush administration for emails surrounding the firing of the eight U.S. attorneys, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales revealed that many of the emails requested could not be produced because they were sent on a non-government email server. The officials had used the private domain gwb43.com, a server run by the Republican National Committee. So, the Bush/Cheney crime syndicate had been routing their email though a PRIVATE REPUBLICAN COMPANY. A PRIVATE REPUBLICAN COMPANY was “handling” the Bush-Cheney crime correspondence, so it wasn’t even routed through the White House mail servers (the same server that housed the Ohio Secretary of State’s backup voter tabulation system that could run in tandem with the actual system on election night so that, if the actual system went down, no data would be lost).
Not only did every network Sunday news show this week cover the story about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton emails, but they were drowning in commentary. Between Meet the Press, Face The Nation, This Week, and Fox News Sunday, Clinton’s “email” or “emails” were referenced more than 100 times on the programs, according to Nexis transcripts. Relentless, saturation coverage, with the Beltway press barely pausing to catch its breath before unloading yet another round of “analysis,” most of which provides little insight but does allow journalists to vent about the Clintons. riggering a firestorm (a guttural roar) that raged for days and consumed the Beltway chattering class the way the D.C. media has become obsessed with the Clinton email story? Absolutely not. Not even close.
The Clinton email story isn’t about lawbreaking,she violated no laws. Clinton violated federal laws. Still, the scandal machine churns on determined to treat the story as a political blockbuster, when it’s just not. The millions of missing .actually incriminating of evil-doing Bush White House emails were treated as a 24-hour story. It was dutifully noted and tossed aside like so many Democratic votes in Florida in 2001.
Then. as now, it’s clear that the only thing Republicans do very well is crookery and inflaming the media with bogus scandals — which is a handy way to distract attention from their crookery and ineptitude.
Just to repeat: In 2007, the story was about millions of missing White House emails that were sought in connection to a Congressional investigation. Yet somehow the archiving of Clinton’s emails today requires exponentially more coverage, and exceedingly more critical coverage.
In the Bush emails we have lots of incriminating evidence in the correspondence that tied Rove and others to the treasonous exposure of Agent Plame, the U.S. attorneys’ purge, the inquiry into charges that Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff had used his entre with others in the GOP to bribe government officials, and God only knows what other scandals. I don’t even know if I want to know. One thing is clear, it is a prima facie case (or, rather, 22 million cases) of obstruction of justice aka the crime Pres. Richard Nixon was charged with by the House of Representatives in 1974 that prompted him to resign being President. In Hillary’s emails of Sexplosion Of Benghazi Lies, Betrayal And Glamour Shots, well, we already know what was in those so-called “personal” emails anyway. Just a bunch of Snapchats with Sid Blumenthal and Huma and the breaking news that Lindsay Graham is gay and John Boehner is an alcoholic.
Both Colin Cancer Powell – seen here waving a bottle of Mrs. Dash in front of the senate and calling it Anthrax – and staff members of Secretary Condoleezza Rice received emails during their tenures that were later deemed to be classified, just like Hillary did. Unlike Hillary, Colin Powell turned over exactly zero docs from when he was SOS despite being asked to do so.
So, basically they all did Benghazi. And Vince Foster too. Why won’t Condoleezza Rice stop murdering Vince Foster, that’s what we’d like to know. Indeed, the report’s conclusion cites “longstanding, systemic weaknesses” in electronic record-keeping “that go well beyond the tenure of any one secretary of state.” Gotcha.
This Republican pattern of mendacity would not seem quite so crazy (although it’s pretty friggin’ crazy) were it not for the fact that most of the Beltway political press has spent quality time validating it for the last twenty years. The political press is now coalescing around the notion that, whereas Hillary might have gotten away with winning the White House if she’d been indicted, now that she hasn’t been indicted and isn’t guilty, she’s in REAL trouble. Republicans’ objective in using its lapdogs in the “liberal media” to exaggerate the Clinton emails controversy is to damage her image in advance of her run for the presidency.
Maybe when this gets even more boring, we can get on with investigating allegations of Trump raping an underage girl, Trump scamming money using the Trump University, Trump not paying his vendors, Trump not paying any taxes, Trump benefiting from bankruptcies leaving others high and dry, Trump using white supremacy memes to be racist, Trump false claims of donating charity, Trump bribing attorneys general, Trump soliciting political funds from foreign powers, ad infinitum.
Fun Fact: When Bill Clinton left office, his staff removed all the “W” keys from the White House keyboards, necessitating a year-long Congressional investigation. When George W Bush left office, his team cold stole all of the hard drives in every computer in the White House.