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White House loses email sent from RNC accounts
So apparently White House staffers routinely uses email accounts set up by the Republican National Committee to send important communications. Nothing wrong with that, right? Well, apparently there is.It turns out that White House staffers are required by law to use government email addresses in order to preserve those communications. And so when some of the emails sent using the RNC addresses just happened to get lost, it caused a little bit of a stir.
The whole RNC email thing had already been under close scrutiny because emails sent before Attorney Alberto Gonzales fired a group of U.S. Attorneys.
A spokesperson for the RNC says that the political committee had set up about 20 email accounts for aids to President Bush, including Karl Rove because those aids were involved with political activities. There's a law prohibiting federal employees from conducting political activities using government resources.
So in other words, you can't use a government email address to send political messages, but you can't use a private email address to send government messages. It's probably no big surprise that staffers occasionally forget which account to use. The question is whether they're intentionally remembering exactly which account to use, and deleting the evidence accordingly.
[via Boing Boing]
Comments
11
Subscribe to commentsJasonApr 12th 2007 6:23PM
They should have done what the Clinton Administration did, just install DNC computers in the White House. That way when you spend taxpayer funded man-hours on political work you won't forget which account to use.
MysteriusApr 12th 2007 8:09PM
Most of it, at least, I'd guess was unintentional... but it'll probably be declared an intentional cover-up anyways.
senorloco444Apr 12th 2007 6:23PM
THis is no surprise, that they "lost" emails in this fashion. This administration has a habit of doing things in secrecy when they are up to no good. It might trip them up this time. :-)
adamApr 12th 2007 7:51PM
hey brad, you don't happen to live in fort wayne do you? i've never seen anybody link an AP article from fortwayne.com before. :)
(i'm in the leo area btw)
Brad LinderApr 12th 2007 7:52PM
Hey Adam,
What happened is I saw the story on Boing Boing, followed their link to another blog, which linked to the Fort Wayne article. So it was a roundabout way to get the AP story.
For the record, I live in New Jersey, but I'm moving to New York next month.
DiRTApr 12th 2007 9:05PM
What's the connection to downloadsquad.com? Am I supposed to download something here?
shadekhApr 12th 2007 11:42PM
Indeed, lets not make downloadsquad into one of those tech news reporting sites. I come here for cool downloads and technology related news directly pertaining to new softwares and features, not some political brouhaha.
What next? Game console articles, filling up this site with fanboys?
len smithApr 13th 2007 12:33AM
Accidental???
Here's the policy:
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"As a result, personnel working on behalf of the EOP [Executive Office of the President] are expected to only use government-provided e-mail services for all official communication."
The handbook further explains: "The official EOP e-mail system is designed to automatically comply with records management requirements."
And if that wasn't clear enough, the handbook notes -- as was the case in the Clinton administration -- that "commercial or free e-mail sites and chat rooms are blocked from the EOP network to help staff members ensure compliance and to prevent the circumvention of the records management requirements."
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Karl Rove didn't accidentally use his RNC email account for all his business for the past six years. And the RNC isn't inept enough to accidentally not back up its email servers.
Fred ThompsonApr 13th 2007 7:09AM
Oh, please. This is not an appropriate post for download squad. This is a political am not/are too thing. This kind of stuff makes Slashdot all but unreadable some times.
Racetrack-OwnerApr 13th 2007 7:09AM
One more vote for Download Squad sticking to the subject. There is no shortage of political whining on the 'net, from both sides. Nobody cares about your politics here.
Brad LinderApr 13th 2007 7:36AM
I'm just curious, how many readers think my story came out as right-wing/left wing? I tried to be as balanced as I could here, specifically because I didn't want to make this a political story.
We post stories on Download Squad all the time about software-related news. For example, yesterday I wrote up a post about a woman who discovered a flaw in the way Turbo Tax forms are filed online that let her access other users' information. Another post a few weeks ago talked about how easy it is to break unsecure passwords.
Neither of these stories directs you to particular software that you can download or use online. But both should serve as reminders that users should be careful in their interactions with computers, whether posting sensitive data online or in choosing a password to secure that data. In the case of the security post, many users pointed out their own solutions for storing passwords.
I suppose I could have written this post as a reminder that it's important to backup emails. But I thought the point was fairly clear. It's kind of funny that the government prohibits employees from using government property for political activity, but also prohibits them from using private property for government activity. What that led to in this case was a situation where a number of official emails sent on unofficial channels were lost, either intentionally, or by accident. Download Squad does not pretend to know either way.