As we wait for the subpoenas to be served on Smartech (and their backup servers at Coptix) Chattanooga TN, we wile away our time exploring the universe of the illegal use of behind-the-scenes, not covered by the Presidential Records Act, hidden from the National Archivist email network variously called "RNCHQ.com" and "gwb43.com."
While we'd like to know what all was said, there is another source which allows us to look at who was saying what to whom. A most creative party has taken the statistical universe of the emails sent by accident in 2004--smack in the summer of the high Bush-Kerry campaign as it happens--to the address "[INSERT-ANYTHING-HERE]@georgewbush.org" and posted way back then by "whitehouse.org." While they may be a satire/parody site (hey, at least they ain't porn any more) but these mails were real. They called that section "The DEAD LETTER OFFICE: GeorgeWBush.org: Bush/Cheney in 2004!"
Our mystery compiler calls his dissection of this data The Missing Link. We do not, that I could see, have a name for this heroic compiler/correlator, an omission presumably inspired by the fact that he or she did this work on the website of George Mason University where the party is either employee or student. We suggest our readers copy all the files, data and lovely, lovely pictures to sites elsewhere, as GMU is likely to find the material embarassing and make it go away. I've got 'em stashed but you get copies too--accidents happen.
Now once you have them stashed away--or if you want to live dangerously and just read 'em there on gmu's site, you need to blow them up enough to be able to read each email address. In IE look in the lower right corner of your screen way at the bottom, there should be a magnifying glass and the number "100%". Click on that and change the number to 150 or 200% or whatever suits your vision.
Smack in the middle of the biggest node (connection through which the largest number of messages pass from one person to another) is a very peculiar address:
A3D561C7B204CB40A2FC9EE89#320020E9FFB@rnc1.rnchq.org
is the way it reads to my eyes; I had to write it down by hand so you might want to check it yourself. Does that sort of string look familiar to anybody, as a style if not these specific combinations? I am most curious about this.
Other addresses include lobbyists Harrison Rivard, loathesome congresswoman Jean Schmidt, various .gov addresses including a US house office and EOP.gov among others; several state government offices, the Republican campaigns from all over the country including Washington State, Nevada, Iowa and most particularly Florida--"rpof" is Republican Party of Florida" and we trust "jeb.com" is self-explanatory. Aipac.org is there too, as is something called "classicstar.com" which appears to be a horse-breeding operation. We don't really want to know any more about that one, do we Brownie?
Anyway, go take a look around. The name it pains me to admit I didn't see at all was that pesky "kr@gwb43.com". One would begin to think that the guy didn't really do very much and wasn't really worth keeping on the payroll, wouldn't one? We knew he wasn't doing anything to justify the salary he gets from the taxpayers, but now we have to wonder what he was doing back then to earn the one he got from the RNC.
Now in fairness (ahem) we must note that these were campaign messages by and large, about which there is nothing illegal at all. Nor is it inherently unreasonable for a new president to hire for his or her staff people who worked on said campaign, provided they have qualifications to exercise the duties of public officials. But here and there, even then, we find a blurring of the lines between the duties of a campaign worker and those of a public employee.
Work is underway to identify the post-campaign careers of many of the people whose emails are recorded here. You can help. I am not claiming this "Missing Link" as identifying any provably criminal behavior...but then we won't know until we check it out, will we? And it certainly goes to show that nobody on the taxpayer payroll had any business using a "gwb43.com" or "rnchq.com" address even one day after the election in 2004.
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Oooh, charts and graphs!
Nice one, Xan!
good stuff
Yes, I had trolled the Dead Letter back when gwb43 first broke, I was mostly looking at the headers for IP addresses of um... our-not-involved friends down in ChattaVegas. While I love this Enron-type datamining, I wish they included the IP addresses also.
So just FYI, my best make of the whole gwb43 thing, is that after the admin were made to look like fools with the whole georgewbush.com / georgewbush.org thing, they registered gwb43.com and started using that for sensitive caging-list type activities. You can look at the timeline of domain regisitrations, and gwb43.com appears to be created to move important people off of georgewbush.com
So the dead letter will not have any references to gwb43...
For the record, again all of these emails now run through the Smartech servers, like rpof, ohgop, etc.
Love you guys for pointing this out. I never realized there was that much in the deal letter database.
That long string is not an address
It's a "message-ID", and it's a long semi-random string because the E-mail standards require it to be unique across the entire Internet. If your mail client doesn't create the message-ID when it sends E-mail, the originating or receiving server will add it.
It's a useful way to track one message everywhere it went, but it's not going to expose anything other than the ID of the server that added it (in this case, rnc1.rnchq.org). Any message with an ID ending in "rnchq.org" was originally sent through the rnchq.org's mail servers, but you probably alredy knew that from the "From" addresses.
--Matt
--Matt
Thanks mattd, that's what I thought
but then again I am some distance from an expert on the inner guts of such matters so thought I would throw it out on the floor and let the cat sniff it for a second opinion. He wasn't informative either so I'm glad you chimed in. :)
gregg palast / its about the caging lists
these are the emails that were eventually forwarded to greg palast and the BBC. they contain the "caging" lists Tim Griffin (tgriffin@rnchq.org) compiled (to remove voters). Palast wrote about these emails and the caging scam in his book Armed Madhouse. Hes been all over it for a long time. He discussed these emails with respect to the the importance of the caging issue with John Conyers recently (as in yesterday, i think). Griffin has now resigned. If you folow the link to the emails and scroll down the page 2/3 of the way you'll find the Griffin email and a link to the caging lists contained in the emails.
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