It’s still only in WaPo.com, not the dead-tree verson yet, but it’s progress.

Long version is here. Short version—from The Invaluable Froomkin of course, starts thusly:

” * The number of White House officials given RNC [Republican National Committee] e-mail accounts is higher than previously disclosed. In March 2007, White House spokesperson Dana Perino said that only a ’handful of officials’ had RNC e-mail accounts. In later statements, her estimate rose to ’50 over the course of the administration.’ In fact, the Committee has learned from the RNC that at least 88 White House officials had RNC e-mail accounts. The officials with RNC e-mail accounts include Karl Rove, the President’s senior advisor; Andrew Card, the former White House Chief of Staff; Ken Mehlman, the former White House Director of Political Affairs; and many other officials in the Office of Political Affairs, the Office of Communications, and the Office of the Vice President.

” * White House officials made extensive use of their RNC e-mail accounts.  Read more 

Very seldom can this be said, but it looks to me like ThinkProgress got so excited by a story that they didn’t (yet) absorb the other, really explosive, story inside it. Check this out:

Justice Department documents released tonight include new emails linking Karl Rove’s top aides — former White House political director Sara Taylor, who resigned last month, and her deputy Scott Jennings — to the U.S. attorney scandal. Subpoenas have been authorized, but not approved, for both Taylor and Jennings.

Significant, sure. Illegal as shit, well, duh! This goes without saying for this crew. But way down the story this sorta leaps out:

The messages from Taylor and Jennings to the Justice officials are sent from their Republican National Committee email accounts.

Now can we get those subpoenas to Chattanooga Rep. Waxman? There is no longer any way anybody can claim that “those RNChq.com and gwb43.com and other Smartech emails were just used for political matters.” These mails were entirely about government business, to wit the US Attorney positions. They should have gone through the legal, mandatory, US Archivist-recorded .gov email system. They did not. Case fucking closed already, dammit.  Read more 

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  Read more 

Oh, Monica, Monica, Monica. I shake my head in sorrow. You should have skipped Regent and the law degree and gone someplace where they taught history. Recent American history for example. Like the Watergate story.

You, dear reader, or I may delete a hundred emails a day. Employees of the Justice Department operate under somewhat different rules. So when one Monica wrote (we don’t know at this point if it was on her .gov email or that nasty gwb43.com one) looked suspicious to several people scanning the Friday Document Dump, including our own scarshapedstar, it was because he noted her use of the word “friendlies.” Now it turns out there were other words of interest in this same mail as well.

These were found, and Monica got busted, by a party with the excellent name of Anonymous Liberal, who happens to be a lawyer too. She/he makes clear just why Monica is now well and truly screwed, blued and tattooed: the words, in bold even, on her email of Feb. 12 2007, Please delete prior versions.  Read more 

Our magic word for today is “imaged.” For some reason that made me think of the old Star Trek ep where they transport into the Bizarro Universe and meet the Spock with the Beard and Uhura is dressed even hotter than usual, complete with dagger in a leg holster. From, as usual, Your Daily Froom:

In a letter to the House oversight committee, the Republican National Committee turned over a heavily caveated list with 37 names on it. It was described as a “current list of users who we believe are or were White House employees using RNC accounts for whom we have been able to identify active e-mail data on operational RNC servers.” The RNC said more names may well show up later.

The RNC says it is “working diligently to identify and preserve all potentially relevant data that may exist” and has already gathered 25.5 million kilobytes of e-mail from the 37. It has also hired a computer forensics firm that has “imaged” several RNC computers and blackberries that are currently being used by White House employees.

The Associated Press has an annotated version of the list. The most prominent name on it, other than Karl Rove of course: Presidential counselor Dan Bartlett.

Are there any contests currently running for “greatest number of weasle words that can be squeezed into one sentence”? If so I have a nominee.  Read more 

Yeah it’s over at the House of Orange but you have got to see The Charts. You’ve probably heard of them but if you haven’t actually seen them you can’t know just how powerful they are.

These have to be on the front page of every paper in the country tomorrow. They should lead off the evening news for at least as many nights as a tragic but isolated shooting incident did. It might even perversely seem to at least slightly exonerate Abu Al G’s repeated “can’t recalls” in his testimony the other day, because who COULD recall all the possible exchanges between the Bush White House and the Bush Justice Department. The contrast between this setup and the one of the previous administration should STFU any further whine of “But Clinton Did It Too!” that these people who hate Clinton so much leap to at every opportunity.

Go look. It’ll take ten seconds. Then (those with graphics skill ’n’ shit) copy them and start spreading them everywhere.  Read more 

From the invaluable ThinkProgress today, the latest “offer” from the RNC as to just how much Congressional oversight they will ever so graciously allow Rep. Waxman to perform:

In a new letter to the Republican National Committee, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman writes that the RNC has provided only minimal information regarding White House officials’ use of RNC e-mail accounts. The purpose of Waxman’s inquiry was in part to determine the extent that White House staff used “non-governmental e-mail accounts to conduct official government business.”

In the new letter, Waxman reveals that the RNC’s response thus far has been to propose that any Congressional requests for emails be filtered through “eight search terms, such as ‘political briefing,’ ‘Hatch Act,’ and ‘2008.’”

Is this cute or what? You think the FBI would have caught Al Capone if they were only allowed to use evidence of him speaking or writing the words “bootlegging” and “criminal conspiracy” and “tax evasion”? Set phasers on “hit ’em with the chair,” Henry.

And just to do our part I think we, all of us here—that means you too readers!— should come up with our own list of “eight search terms” that would be most productive in this search.  Read more 

No, this is not about the comic strip of the late Johnny Hart. “BC” in this discussion means “blind copy,” an aspect of emails often overlooked and almost certainly of great importance in the ongoing saga of the RNC criminal email system.

Excellent, well-explained, straightforward explanation of technical stuff for non-technical folks over at technetron’s diary at the House of Orange today. The problem noted? We—or more precisely the Congressional committees investigating this fetid mess—are mostly being provided with copies, dead-tree printouts, of the nefarious illegal emails in question here.

We need the originals, in electronic form. Here’s why:  Read more 

Well, I have un-stickied yesterdays “gwb43.com: Fri. 13th Edition” on account of it was not only getting exceedingly long but that, well, it isn’t Friday the 13th any more.

So use this post as a depository for data droppings, either links to newer statements, comments from other blogs or news sites, or personal thoughts on Our Story So Far. This has been a shock’n’awe couple of days as far as volume of information coming out as this story starts to hit the national media. (Except for Fox, which rumor has it is not covering the story at all. Heh.)

We need to pull back and look at the larger picture.  Read more 

UPDATE 3: Further Froomkin Fun, Same link as in Update 2 in the category of Credit Where Bloggy Credit is Due. Okay, he missed us [sob] but we’ll get over it:

Blogger Josh Marshall writes: “I can say that I am very confident … that orders from Pat Fitzgerald were the reason for the change in White House policy in 2004. So the change in policy was tied to yet another criminal investigation of the White House. And the White House and the key employees in question — namely Karl Rove and people working for him at the White House political office — were specifically on notice not to destroy the emails they sent through the RNC servers. And yet they took affirmative steps to continue destroying them, even after all of this had happened.”

It was in October 2004 that Rove suddenly turned over to Fitzgerald a July 2003 e-mail sent to then-deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley, that clearly showed that Rove had spoken to then-Time magazine reporter Cooper. In subsequent testimony, Rove says he had forgotten the conversation, in which he revealed Plames identity, but remembered it after his lawyers found that e-mail.

Michael Isikoff wrote in Newsweek in October 2005: “Why didn’t the Rove e-mail surface earlier? [Rove’s] lawyer says it’s because an electronic search conducted by the White House missed it because the right ’search words’ weren’t used. (The White House and Fitzgerald both declined to comment.)”

You’ve got to wonder which e-mail account Rove used for that e-mail — and how it was discovered.

And Glenn Greenwald blogs for Salon about the multitude of examples of the Bush administration’s “terrible luck with finding documents.”

UPDATE 2: Froom Fingers Fishy Finagling. Noting the “dog ate our emails” excuse for Rover…er I mean “Rove” and Rove alone, the best journalist at WaPo notes that Waxman is So Wise in the Ways of (Computer) Science:

These new, largely unexplained revelations were included in an extraordinary series of letters that Waxman, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent to 17 government agencies yesterday demanding that they preserve any e-mails received from or sent to non-governmental e-mail accounts used by White House staffers.

So Rove’s end of the emails may be swept out, eh? Well, every mail has two ends at very minimum. Chop-block the recipients. It’s like gathering the shotgun pellets after they’ve been fired rather than while they’re still in the shell…but cops do this every damn day of the week. E-cops too. Go read the whole thing. [WaPo link changed to single-page version rather than their split-into-five-jumps-just-to-cheeze-out-extra-page-hits (or maybe discourage readership of material embarassing to their other staffers?) version.]

UPDATE: Document dump, as in the documents themselves, is now up at the House Judiciary Committee website. Document Dump Discussion, comparison, analysis, etc., is already in progress over at Talking Points Memo. That’s fast-moving so get there early (like now). This is live, realtime and messy so don’t jump to any “OMG!!” moments until you’ve read downthread and, preferably, consulted the original to see if it says what the poster says it says. Once burned, ya know.

*****

The parallel stories of Karl’s Missing Emails—the ones going through Republican National Committee channels which we will refer to as the “.com” ones, as well as the newly-discovered-to-be-(oops!)-“missing” from government files, hereafter called the “.gov” scandal—continues apace. This post will be today’s contribution to the effort to herd the Known Facts, the Unknown Facts, the Facts We Don’t Know We Don’t Know, well you get the point, into one place for convenience of readers.

There may be too much detail for some who have been following this right along. Sorry. There may be too little, particularly in links or supporting documentation, for those who are just hearing about this for the first time and still at the “WTF is the deal with this email shit?” stage. Sorry. We will endeavor to be clear on our sources, with links to reputable outlets who themselves cite sources where possible.

In some cases there will be quotations for which attribution cannot be supplied because they are unable to speak on the record for legal or other reasons. Use whatever standards you usually apply in judging the veracity of these, or else the common sense God gave a goat as my grandmother used to say.

This will be added on to as the day goes on. Some posts may not seem directly related to the topic but mostly likely will as you read along, such as for instance this NYT: Bush Threatens a Veto Over Intel Bill from early this morning. It’s relevant, trust me.  Read more 

Ya know how there are some really rotten people, who do ghastly and awful things but about whom “some will say” things like “That was a really awful thing he did, but dayam ya gotta admire how well he did it?”

Rove is not one of those people. How did we ever get the impression he was some kind of Evil Geenius? If this HuffPo piece is accurate, Kwazy Kawl has not only guaranteed his own occupancy of a room at the Graybar Hotel in the fairly near future, he’s pretty well assured that his pals at SmartTech, GovTech and Coptix will be in the next few rooms down the hall. This is just beyond stupid:

The White House said Wednesday it had mishandled Republican Party-sponsored e-mail accounts used by nearly two dozen presidential aides, resulting in the loss of an undetermined number of e-mails concerning official White House business.  Read more 

Warmed by the increasing heat from below, the sluggish national media begins to take notice of the campaign to run the country of the Republican Party, by the Republican Party, for the Republican Party, that it might not perish from the earth (the rest of us of course can submit or go to hell). Via LA Times:

When Karl Rove and his top deputies arrived at the White House in 2001, the Republican National Committee provided them with laptop computers and other communication devices to be used alongside their government-issued equipment.

The back-channel e-mail and paging system, paid for and maintained by the RNC, was designed to avoid charges that had vexed the Clinton White House — that federal resources were being used inappropriately for political campaign purposes.  Read more 

You realize that little ol’ Correntewire.com—us frontpagers, you readers, all of us together—have over the last week or so been the recipients of a full-scale Rovian Red-Cape operation? Which is still going on thanks to links from the exceedingly fatuous Michelle Malkin and other sites? You have a ringside seat at a little teensy bit of prime political theater. Garcon, more popcorn please. And fill everyone’s glass, and keep ’em coming. Dissection is thirsty work.  Read more