The Lost e-mails or, The dog ate my homework!

It’s time to get past all he hype on Anna Nicole’s baby, Rosie and Don Imus. Let’s now look at what the current Bush White House would really like all of us to just ignore. This time I am not referring to the current illegal occupation of Iraq or all the screw ups with FEMA, the hurricanes and the Walter Reed Medical Center fiasco. I also believe that just as it was with President Nixon and the Watergate scandal, it will be the smaller issues such as the recent lost e-mails that will eventually demonstrate just how far the president’s people will go to keep the truth away from the American public.

Let start with these issues of the lost e-mails at the Republican National Committee (RNC). These are the e-mails that may have potentially damaging evidence regarding the eight US attorneys fired by the Alberto Gonzales Justice department. The Democratic Senator from Vermont, and committee chairman; Patrick Leahy immediately and rightfully commented that he did not believe the White House claim of “lost e-mails”. “You can’t erase e-mails, not today. They’ve gone through too many computer servers. Those e-mails are there; they just don’t want to produce them. Its like the infamous 18-minute gap on the Nixon White House tapes.” Leahy went on to say, “Its like saying the dog ate my homework.” Most experts say today that it takes tremendous effort, from someone with specific computer experience to completely delete an e-mail, much less a group of e-mails. And even if they were successful, an expert could probably tell that “something” has been deleted on purpose.

But one must also ask, why were they using non-government e-mail addresses in the first place? (The Democrats say that it was to cover up their illegal activity.) The White House says the firing of the US attorneys was due to their poor performance and was not due to any political issues. However, the White House also says that they were using the RNC e-mail addresses in order to comply with the federal “Hatch Act”. This is the act that prohibits using government resources and computer systems for conducting political business. So which is it? If the attorneys were not fired for political reasons, why did the White House need to use the RNC e-mail addresses? Both Senator Leahy and Republican Senator, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania have now told the White House that they want to hire an independent and “mutually trusted computer forensics expert ” to look for the “lost” e-mails.

Even though the White House continues to try and stall, the House Judiciary Committee has told the RNC that they expect them to deliver “All of the relevant e-mails by April 20th.”

Regardless of the outcome, this is just another example as to why anyone from the current Bush administration, that is required to testify to any congressional committee, must do so while being under oath. With the lack of oversight over the past seven years, it is no wonder that all the new congressional committee chairman in both the Senate and the House have really got their jobs cut out for them.

As with the Abramoff scandal, the deeper they continue to dig, the uglier it gets.