GwB43: The White House, vote theft, and the email trail

[Joolz]

This could be big. If it gets legs and walks. I've been following several threads on blogs where people noticed the "gwb43.com" email address that was in the emails included in the document dump (y'all do know that there are 18 days missing from the records released; right? Watergate deja vu, anyone? 18 minutes morphs into 18 days?), thought it rather strange for an "official" email, and proceeded to investigate. It's been very interesting to watch the sharing of information, discovery, and collective brainstorming take place. What's posted below is a good rehash of what they have come up with just in the past couple of days.

GwB43: The White House, vote theft, and the email trail
posted by Joseph : 5:33 AM, Thursday, March 22, 2007

GWB43 is the name of an internet server owned by the Republican National Committee.

Oddly enough, communications revealed in the course of the Great U.S. Attorney Purge document dump reveal that key figures within the administration used such email addresses as [email protected].

The White House has its own internal email system, ending in the .gov suffix, as mandated by the Presidential Records Act. As Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) notes:

CREW has learned that to fulfill its statutory obligations under the PRA, the White House email system automatically copies all messages created by staff and sends them to the White House Office of Records Management for archiving. It appears that the White House deliberately bypassed the automatic archiving function of its own email system that was designed to ensure compliance with the PRA.

So why are White House personnel using private email addresses to bypass this system?

A not-unrelated question: Did Patrick Fitzgerald know about this bypass when he subpoenaed White House emails pursuant to the Plamegate investigation? I doubt that he did. If he had, Scooter might not have been the only one brought to trial.

This story by Joseph Hughes and Melissa McEwan compiles statements by George Bush, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Michael Chertoff and Alberto Gonzales, all of whom have claimed that they do not use email for business. Oddly, Rice made this claim at the same time let slip that she had used email to communicate with Richard Clarke.

Dubya's stated reasoning for not entering the computer age is both disconcerting and hilariously inarticulate:

"I tend not to e-mail - not only tend not to e-mail, I don't e-mail, uh, because of, uh, the different record requests that could happen to a president. I don't want to receive e-mails, 'cause, you know, there's no telling what somebody would e-mail me and it would show up as, uh, you know, part of some kind of a story that - and I wouldn't be able to say, 'Well, I didn't read the e-mail' - 'But I sent it your address; how can you say you didn't?' So, in other words, I'm very cautious about e-mailing."

All very amusing, but can we really believe that in the modern age these people do not use the most convenient messaging system available?

Or could it be that all these people recall how Ollie North was tripped up by the discovery of certain emails?

If the Bush White House used GWB43 to route around history, we must ask a question straight out of the Parsifal legends: What is GWB43 and who does it serve?

The answer takes us into the dark mysteries of the 2004 election in Ohio...

Here (with a hat tip to Jackstraw45 of DU) is the WHOIS info on GWB43:

Domain Name: GWB43.COM

Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Republican National Committee [email protected]
310 First Street SE
Washington, DC 20003
US
999 999 9999 fax: 999 999 9999

Record expires on 16-Jan-2008.
Record created on 16-Jan-2004.
Database last updated on 21-Mar-2007 17:45:46 EDT.

Domain servers in listed order:

NS1.CHA.SMARTECHCORP.NET
A.NS.TRESPASSERS-W.NET

"Trespassers-W.net"? Odd name, that.

We learn that this same Tennessee-based hosting service -- Smartech -- played a mysterious role in the 2004 election in Ohio. From a November 7, 2006 story by luaptifer at Daily Kos:

Ohio's election results are hosted on the same servers by the partisan companies that run websites like Georgewbush.com and many of the familiar Republican group sites.

More (also see here):

SOS Blackwell also neglected to inform that he outsourced Election Night hosting services to the provider of Internet operations for the Republican National Committee, SMARTech Corp. It's clear that most of the IP address space allocated to Smartechcorp, if it has a domain name, is operated by the RNC or its functionaries and allies.

SMARTECH lists the following corporate address: SMARTECH CORPORATION PO BOX 11181 Chattanooga TN US 37401 Their web page is here. They offer internet hosting, streaming media and so forth.

This firm handles everything Republican:

On August 22, 2004, SMARTech Corp (smartechcorp.net) announced that it would be "hosting" the Republican National Convention in New York City, providing "convention speeches, video-on-demand 'streams' and live shots of events through powerful Web servers, most of which are at Smartech’s headquarters in downtown Chattanooga." The announcement stated that the "company also hosts the Bush-Cheney campaign Web site, at [url]http://www.georgewbush.com,[/url] and the national committee’s site, http://www.GOP.com."

Smartech shows up in this interesting information technology story from 2004, which outlines a still-unsolved mystery. If the reader will forgive a digression...

During election season, web surfers from outside the United States were not able to access Bush's Web site, GeorgeWBush.com, even though surfers within U.S. borders had no problem doing so. Why this oddity, and who was responsible? The site used network management technology from Akamai Technologies Inc. to restrict access. An Akamai spokesman referred all questions to the hosting company, Smartech. Yet Smartech's president said "All we do is host the site. I have no control over what's being done outside our servers."

That strange business probably has no link to the decision made by Ohio's notorious Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell, to route election night results through RNC servers. I mention the matter here because the conundrum gnaws at me. I can think of no legitimate -- or illegitimate -- reason why anyone within the party would want to restrict foreigners from looking at GeorgeWBush.com.

(Incidentally, the name Akamai has turned up in these pages before: Defense pseudo-contractor Brent Wilkes named several of his fake companies Akamai. However, there is a real -- and quite legitimate -- company called Akamai, based in Mountain View, California.)

So, what does it mean that Ken Blackwell used Smartech for Ohio's election night hosting services? One might, after all, expect a Republican to give state business to a Republican-friendly company. As one observer remarked, this decision seems, at first glance, akin to an Irish drinker going to an Irish pub.

However, one does not need to exercise much imagination to see how anyone using the net for nefarious purposes would want a "friendly" hosting company handling ultra-sensitive duties. Hosting companies keep records of who does what. If you are using computers to do something you don't want the world to know about, you don't want those records available to just anyone.

As the controversy over the 2004 elections gathered steam, Karl Rove made a joke about fixing the election returns from a computer in the White House basement. This remark always struck me as the sort of "joke" that the guy in Rope might have uttered: "Yeah, sure, I strangled my friend for no good reason and hid his body in the cupboard! Now seriously, how about that drink...?"

The point is that the Diebold tabulators -- the "mother machines" as Teresa Kerry once put it -- were online. A D.U. commenter offers what I consider interesting speculation (paragraph breaks added for readability):

I might be talking out of my ass here, but from what I can remember, Blackwell had direct access to the Diebold tabulator from his office so he could "authorize" the results. That tabulator had links to the machines throughout the state.

Updating the election results was live, but I bet the tabulator server and the election results host server are different - one would be Diebold and the other SMARTECH. Running the tabulator on the same host server as the election results would have been too compromising.

But, there had to be an ftp (or something) link between the tabulator and the election results host for the updating. That would have been configured either by the tabulator company (Diebold) or the RNC. If badly configured, this could have allowed open access to the tabulator results from anyone with admin access to the RNC owned SMARTECH host. This would have given Blackwell plausible deniability. "Just let our techies configure that uplink there...).

If the SMARTECH host server was used in this way, it's illegal because political parties aren't allowed to access raw election data. Only checking the server log would tell whether the election server was used to look at raw tabulator data. Of course, if it was actually used to manipulate data, that would be election fraud. manipulation of election data could easily have been done at the tabulator level or via access to the voting machines. Both are criminal acts. Because the servers were used in an election, they would be auditable material.

It would have needed one man or woman to steal Ohio, together with fudged recounts. That much appears clear. One man or woman.

"Auditable material." Of course, an audit presumes access to the correct information.

Now, I must stress the speculative nature of all this. I have no evidence that Smartech is anything other than an honest, responsibly-run firm.

Here is a list of domains that share mailservers and nameservers with gwb43. On the mailserver list, we find domains connected to Bush, Newt Gingrich, and ohiogop.org. (Blackwell was the party chief in Ohio.) Most of the sites are either Republican or far-right Christian.

LINK to Original Post at CannonFire/Joseph Cannon

[spiritme]

Joolz....you super slueth!
what a find!
thanks for that info!
I say we pass it on.....guess we already know that spin will start as soon as they can figure out another lie!

[Shirleypal]

Thanks so much Joolz's will have to go through this after work later today.

[tiffany]

So who do we send this info to.............and who is on the case already...........hmmm.......interesting.......

[Linnea]

Wow!

Joolz - please do a double major, including one in forensic journalism.

[tiffany]

Citizens for Ethics & Responsibility sez letter sent to Waxman


…asking for an investigation into whether the White House has violated its mandatory record-keeping obligation under the Presidential Records Act (PRA).

snip

CREW has learned that to fulfill its statutory obligations under the PRA, the White House email system automatically copies all messages created by staff and sends them to the White House Office of Records Management for archiving. It appears that the White House deliberately bypassed the automatic archiving function of its own email system that was designed to ensure compliance with the PRA.

[snip] In this matter, CREW cannot bring a lawsuit challenging the White House on its compliance with the PRA because of a legal precedent that relies on presidents to honor the mandatory record-keeping practices, with no judicial review.

http://www.correntewire.com/evading_inv ... _gwb43_com

[tiffany]

Rove's "Dirty Tricks" Email Servers
by BloggerJohn
Sat Mar 17, 2007 at 11:19:08 AM PDT

"Imagine an administration that designed a special way to communicate to keep their secrets secret from investigations and history. Ok, stop imagining, because it's already here!!

On the talking points website, we find an email with J. Scott Jennings Signature --a signature is the electronic equivalent to his business card. And it says ---"

"Ok, so Karl's assistant doesn't use the WH email system but rather gwb43.com. So, let's query the WhoIs database to see who owns gwb43.com:

Jennings used an e-mail account registered to the Republican National Committee, where Griffin had worked as an opposition researcher.

Democratic congressional aides said they will investigate whether using the private address for government business violated laws against using taxpayer resources for political work or signaled that White House officials considered the firing of U.S. attorneys to be primarily a political issue. Jennings did not return a call to his office seeking a comment.

Karl Rove's outside email account, [email][email protected]
But--and here it gets amusing or Orwellian, depending upon your sense of humor--someone should subpoena everything on these servers bec. National Security might have been discussed on this alternative channel. But who--the NSC or the DOJ?[/B]

I spoke to someone at The Cleveland Plain Dealer about this story and server location and emailed the Times with the location and kos link."

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/3/4/135310/0946

***********************

"One of the emails to the recently dismissed DOJ Chief of Staff D. Kyle Sampson came from White House Deputy Political Director J. Scott Jennings, who was conducting official business not from his White House email address, but from [email protected] .

This is what comes up with when you do a domain search:"

Registrant:
Republican National Committee
310 First Street SE
Washington, DC 20003
US

E-mail correspondence between Kyle Sampson and Scott Jennings
03-13-2007
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/s ... ultpage=1&
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/s ... ultpage=2&
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/s ... ultpage=3&
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/s ... ultpage=4&

[tiffany]

1. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/11/7/144314/082
Ohio website for live Election Night Dashboard moves from State of Ohio to
SMARTechcorp.net IP address managed by the Republican National Committee

"Mid-term ballots are likely to hand over at least one chamber to Democrats on Tuesday in elections overcast by a storm of GOP scandal. The vortex threatens Ken Blackwell, Ohio's Secretary of State (SOS), who aspires to be Governor while dancing at the eyewall's edge. In Ohio, even lobbyists are gagging on the pervasive sleaze of pay-to-play government and Blackwell mistakenly invests in Diebold shares. Voters have become fed up with corruption in government and their renewed fondness for ethical politics that has been missing for so long may shine too bright a light to allow Blackwell the confidence of their votes.

"The takeaway message: Ohio's election results are hosted on the same servers by the partisan companies that run websites like eorgewbush.com and many of the familiar Republican group sites. The people who consoldiate GOP operations in Chattanooga early this decade have been responsible for Ohio's election night results since 2004 and will probably continue to do so if J. Kenneth Blackwell extends his pay-for-play policies as Governor of Ohio."

***************

Note only should Congress do something about this immediately. It is imperative that we let all of them know that we know and demand justice.

Think Al Gore should want to read bout this...

[Shirleypal]

MSNBC.com


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WP: E-mails show moves to replace prosecutor
Administration worked months to appoint Rove aide in Arkansas
By Dan Eggen and Amy Goldstein
The Washington Post
Updated: 10:02 p.m. CT March 22, 2007
Two months before Bud Cummins was fired as U.S. attorney in Little Rock, a protege of presidential adviser Karl Rove was maneuvering with the Justice Department to take his place.

Last April, Tim Griffin, a Rove aide and longtime GOP operative, sent the attorney general's chief of staff a flattering letter about himself written by Cummins, the prosecutor he was trying to replace, internal e-mails released this week show. Rove and Harriet Miers, then the White House counsel, were keenly interested in putting him in the position, the e-mails reveal.

New documents also show that Justice and White House officials were preparing for President Bush's approval of the appointment as early as last summer, five months before Griffin took the job.

The unusual appointment of Griffin, now serving as the interim U.S. attorney in Little Rock, has been one of the central issues in the Justice Department's firing of eight U.S. attorneys, which led to this week's constitutional showdown between Congress and the White House over the testimony of some of Bush's closest advisers.

Thousands of pages of e-mails and other documents underscore the extraordinary planning and effort, at the highest levels of the Justice Department and White House, to secure Griffin a job running one of the smaller U.S. attorney's offices in the country.

The e-mails show how D. Kyle Sampson, then the attorney general's chief of staff, and other Justice officials prepared to use a change in federal law to bypass input from Arkansas' two Democratic senators, who had expressed doubts about placing a former Republican National Committee operative in charge of a U.S. attorney's office. The evidence runs contrary to assurances from Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales that no such move had been planned.

"This was a very loyal soldier to the Republicans and the Bush administration, and they wanted to reward him," said Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.). "They had every right to do this, but it's the way they handled it, and the way they tried to cover their tracks and mislead Congress, that has turned this into a fiasco for them."

Griffin declined to comment yesterday but said in a previous interview that he was being unfairly maligned by Democrats. He has announced that he will not seek Senate confirmation to become Little Rock's chief federal prosecutor but will remain until a replacement is found.

Accomplished political operative
In political circles, Griffin is widely considered an aggressive and accomplished Republican political operative. He was research director at the RNC during Bush's 2004 campaign, and he went to work for Rove at the White House in 2005.

Administration officials and many Republicans say that regardless of politics, Griffin has the credentials to be U.S. attorney.

"He's more qualified to hold that position than most of the people who came to that job in the first term," said Mark Corallo, who worked as the Justice Department's communication director when John D. Ashcroft was attorney general. "Can anyone blame Karl Rove for weighing in on behalf of someone who worked for him who happens to be thoroughly qualified for the job?"

Griffin, raised in Magnolia, Ark., is a Tulane University Law School graduate who studied at Oxford and has spent 10 years as a prosecutor in the Judge Advocate General's Corps of the Army Reserve. His return to Little Rock came after a stint in Iraq.

Cummins's dismissal differs from the firings of the seven other ousted federal prosecutors in several respects. Cummins was told he was being removed last June, and the rest were told on Dec. 7. Justice Department officials also have not publicly said Cummins's departure was related to his performance in office, as they have with the others. They acknowledged last month that he was fired simply to make room for Griffin.

But documents show that Cummins was clearly a target of Sampson's two-year effort to fire a group of U.S. attorneys who did not qualify as what he called "loyal Bushies." He was recommended for removal as early as March 2005.

Cummins said he had no idea of those plans until he was notified of his firing last June. Sometime in the next couple of months, he said, it became clear that Griffin was going to get the job, and Cummins stepped aside in December.

"Was it because Tim Griffin was working for Karl Rove?" Cummins said this week. "I don't know, and I don't think it really matters at this point."

The e-mails, however, show just how aggressively Griffin sought the appointment. On April 27, for example, he used a private e-mail account to send a note to Sampson, then Gonzales's chief of staff.

"Kyle, This might also be helpful," Griffin wrote, enclosing a flattering, four-paragraph note that Cummins had written nearly four years earlier, after Griffin had worked in his office as a special assistant U.S. attorney.

"Just thought you should have it," Griffin said.


By June 13, about a week before Cummins would be told he was losing his job, Sampson wrote to Monica Goodling, senior counsel to Gonzales, to tell her that a colleague had the necessary pre-nomination paperwork for Griffin. He said that he would speak the following morning with Michael A. Battle, chief of the office that oversees U.S. attorneys, and make sure that Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty's office "knows that we are now executing this plan."

Sampson's note suggests the plan was not new: "I did tell them this was likely coming several months ago."

By July 25, a White House aide wrote to Sampson to ask whether she could begin trying to win over Pryor. "Is that a problem since he has not yet been nominated for U.S. attorney?" the aide wrote, referring to Griffin.

"If the president has already approved Griffin, then part of our 'consultation' (to meet the 'advice and consent' requirements of Constitution) would be to tell them we were going to start a BI on Griffin," Sampson replied six minutes later, using shorthand for a background investigation. "I assume this has already happened."

More complications
But Griffin was never formally nominated, in part because it became clear that Pryor was concerned about Griffin as a candidate, according to documents and officials. By August, Sampson and others were devising ways to hire Griffin into the Justice Department's criminal division until he could be moved into the U.S. attorney's spot.

On Aug. 18, Rove aide J. Scott Jennings used an RNC e-mail address to arrange a telephone call about Griffin with Sampson and Goodling. "Tell us when, Scott, and we'll be on it," Sampson wrote back.

Less than an hour later, Goodling wrote to Sampson to fill him in on the latest complications.

"We have a senator prob, so while wh is intent on nominating, scott thinks we may have a confirmation issue," she wrote. "The possible solution I suggested to scott was that we (DOJ) pick him up as a political . . . and then install him as an interim" U.S. attorney.

"I agree but don't think it really should matter where we park him here," Sampson replied, "as AG will appoint him forthwith to be USA."

Within days, the e-mails show, Justice officials had arranged to hire Griffin into a political position in headquarters, at a salary of $142,900, then transfer him immediately to work in the U.S. attorney's office in Little Rock and await his nomination.

"Tim Griffin is here," Goodling wrote on Sept. 27, the morning he started at the agency.

As a result of this plan, Griffin had been in Little Rock for more than a month when he received an official Justice Department notice that he would be interviewed for the position of interim U.S. attorney. Goodling already had alerted him that the interview would be a formality, e-mails show.

Goodling and Battle, who had been told of the plan to install Griffin the previous spring, were two of the three interviewers during the session.

Staff writer Michael Abramowitz contributed to this report.

© 2007 The Washington Post Company
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17746777/

[Shirleypal]

Documents: Gonzales OK'd U.S. Attorney Firings

POSTED: 9:41 pm EDT March 23, 2007
UPDATED: 10:02 pm EDT March 23, 2007

WASHINGTON -- Newly released documents contradict Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' claims that he was not closely involved in the firings of eight U.S. attorneys.

Documents released Friday night by the Justice Department show Gonzales actually approved plans for the dismissals.

Justice Department officials said Gonzales and at least five top Justice Department officials met Nov. 27 and focused on a five-step plan for carrying out the firings.

There, Gonzales is said to have signed off on the plan, which was crafted by his chief of staff, Kyle Sampson. Sampson resigned last week in the wake of the political firestorm surrounding the firings. He's due to testify before a congressional panel next week.

Previous Stories:
March 22, 2007: Deal Sought Over Testimony In Prosecutor Firings
March 21, 2007: Panel OKs White House Subpoenas
March 20, 2007: Bush Stands Firm On Prosecutor Firings
March 16, 2007: Republican: Gonzales Stands No Chance
March 15, 2007: Democrats Consider Subpoenas In Prosecutor Firings
March 12, 2007: Senator Wants Attorney General To Resign

LINK

[SETIsLady]

A Democratic House committee chairman yesterday told the Republican National Committee and the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign to retain copies of all e-mails sent or received by White House officials using e-mail accounts under their control, raising the political stakes in the congressional inquiry into U.S. attorneys' firings.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) said his broadly written request was based on evidence that White House officials -- particularly aides to top political adviser Karl Rove -- have used their politically related e-mail accounts to hide the conduct of official business regarding the prosecutor firings and other matters being investigated by Congress.

The e-mails of White House officials maintained on RNC e-mail accounts may be relevant to multiple congressional investigations," Waxman wrote to the group's chairman, Mike Duncan, adding that as "governmental records" they are subject to preservation requirements and "eventual public disclosure."

Waxman, chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said he also expects Duncan and Marc Racicot, the former Bush-Cheney campaign chief, to arrange a briefing on how their groups control and preserve such e-mails. A spokeswoman for Duncan, Tracey Schmitt, said of Waxman's letter, "We're reviewing it and will take appropriate action." Racicot did not return a phone call.

The request by a Democratic lawmaker for access to records kept by a rival party's campaign offices has a precedent: In the mid-1990s, when the same committee was under Republican control and investigating alleged campaign finance abuses by the Clinton White House, it demanded and obtained hundreds of pages of Democratic campaign records and communications.

"This is a classic congressional document-preservation warning," said University of Baltimore law professor Charles Tiefer, a former deputy and acting counsel to the House from 1984 to 1995. He said failure to comply could expose the groups to possible obstruction charges.

Yesterday's request was based, Waxman said, on at least three White House officials' use of Republican Party-affiliated e-mail accounts for some of their work in recent years, as well as on reports that Rove routinely uses his RNC e-mail account for business.

Waxman noted for example that J. Scott Jennings, the White House deputy director of political affairs, used a "gwb43.com" e-mail account last August to discuss the replacement of the U.S. attorney for Arkansas, Bud Cummins, according to e-mails released to Congress by the White House.

Barry Jackson, a deputy to Rove, in 2003 used a "georgewbush.com" e-mail account to consult with Neil G. Volz, then an aide to lobbyist Jack Abramoff, about nominating one of Abramoff's Indian tribe clients for a Medal of Freedom, according to a copy of an e-mail. Abramoff is now serving a prison sentence for bank fraud, and Volz plead guilty to conspiracy charges last year.

Susan B. Ralston, while she was executive assistant to Rove, similarly used "georgewbush.com" and "rnchq.org" e-mail accounts to confer in 2001 and 2003 with Abramoff, her former boss, about matters of interest to Abramoff's clients.

In a related e-mail, an Abramoff aide said Ralston had warned that "it is better to not put this stuff in writing in [the White House] . . . email system because it might actually limit what they can do to help us, especially since there could be lawsuits, etc."

Abramoff's response, according to a copy of his e-mail, was: "Dammit. It was sent to Susan on her rnc pager and was not supposed to go into the WH system."

Waxman said the exchange indicated that in some instances, White House officials were using nongovernmental accounts "specifically to avoid creating a record of communications" that are nonetheless subject to the committee's jurisdiction.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01979.html

[SETIsLady]

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The White House is being accused of improperly trying to hide e-mails about government business by using unofficial e-mail accounts.

Congressional investigators say they found communications on one account from top White House aides about official matters, like the December firings of eight U.S. attorneys.

Those e-mails were discovered on a Republican National Committee e-mail domain called gwb43.com. That domain is not part of the official White House communication system.

Those e-mails were discovered on a Republican National Committee e-mail domain called gwb43.com. That domain is not part of the official White House communication system.

A White House spokesman defended the use of outside e-mail accounts as an appropriate method of separating official business from political campaign work.

But the use of those accounts by officials discussing the firings -- and one from now-imprisoned lobbyist Jack Abramoff -- have led a liberal watchdog group to accuse administration of trying to skirt the law governing preservation of presidential records.

"They wanted to make sure that no record could ever be found of what they were really up to in the White House," Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told CNN.

Rep. Henry Waxman, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has sent letters to the RNC and the former head of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, arguing that outside e-mails are subject to the act.

In March, Waxman notified those groups that congressional investigators "have uncovered evidence that White House staff have used non-governmental e-mail accounts to conduct official government business," and called on them to preserve those records.

White House political advisers used the outside e-mails to discuss the December firings of federal prosecutors in eight cities, a shake-up that has led to a firestorm on Capitol Hill, documents released amid the flap have shown.

Waxman's committee released another chain of e-mails it said illustrated the type of exchange taking place on the account. The e-mails began with a February 2003 message from Abramoff to Susan Ralston, the former executive assistant to President Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove.

In the chain, Abramoff advised Ralston that an upcoming Interior Department gaming compact with a Louisiana Indian tribe would be "an anathema to our supporters down there."

When an associate notified him that his e-mail had been forwarded to another White House aide, Abramoff replied, "Dammit. It was sent to Susan on her RNC pager and was not supposed to go into the WH (White House) system."

Abramoff pleaded guilty to corruption charges in January 2006 in a wide-ranging Capitol Hill influence-peddling probe that has led to guilty pleas from several former congressional staffers and Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio. Ralston resigned in October out of concern that her ties to Abramoff would be "a distraction," the White House said.

Neither administration officials nor Republican Party officials would agree to be interviewed on camera after repeated requests from CNN. In a written statement, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said staffers used different computers "to have a separate e-mail account for political activities."

Stanzel said that procedure was modeled on "the historical practice of previous administrations." But John Podesta, who served as White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration, disputed that.

"It doesn't appear that they were doing what we did, which was to segregate political activity from official activity," he said.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/04/09/ ... index.html

Whats it going to take ?

[Shirleypal]

Don't ya just love technology, what a bunch of idiots.

[Divinorumus]

Ah come on now, that is what you get and deserve for putting others in charge of you. Why yous humons keep wanting to elect others to be in charge of your lives and thus allowing them to take advantage of yous all is beyond me. You are asking for all of this mess when you live your lives like that. Hey, just knock it off with all the leaders and take care of your own selves and lives without them bosses you put in charge of you and you wouldn't have any of this going on. Crazy earthlings, when you allow others to be in charge of you and your lives as if they are your masters, expect to be used and abused - you ASKED for it by allowing others to be in charge of YOU and your butts!