E-Mail Saga Gets Fishier

Margaret Talev and Marisa Taylor write for McClatchy Newspapers: "The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee accused the Bush administration Thursday of trying to bury potentially damaging Republican Party e-mails about eight fired U.S. attorneys and compared the situation to Watergate.

"'They say they have not been preserved. I don't believe that!' said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., of e-mails that the White House had said a day earlier might be lost. 'You can't erase e-mails, not today. They've gone through too many servers. Those e-mails are there, they just don't want to produce them. It's like the infamous 18-minute gap in the Nixon White House tapes.'

"Leahy said the idea of lost e-mails was 'like saying the dog ate my homework.'

"His tirade on the Senate floor blindsided the White House and intensified the confrontation between Congress and the presidency over the fired U.S. attorneys."

Tom Hamburger and Richard A. Serrano write in the Los Angeles Times: "The growing controversy over White House record-keeping and disclosure swirled around presidential advisor Karl Rove on Thursday. . . .

"As demands for documents escalated, other Democrats suggested Thursday that the White House had withheld potentially embarrassing information, a charge the administration vigorously denies. . . .

"Leahy and Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the judiciary panel, wrote a letter to White House Counsel Fred F. Fielding asking that the White House establish an 'objective process for investigating this matter, including the use of a mutually trusted computer-forensic expert.' . . .

"Also Thursday, Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Linda T. Sanchez (D-Lakewood), chairwoman of the panel's administrative law subcommittee, wrote to RNC Chairman Robert M. 'Mike' Duncan, demanding 'prompt delivery' by next week of all e-mails stored by the RNC related to the firing of the eight U.S. attorneys."

Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes in the New York Times: "In a letter to Mr. Leahy and Representative John Conyers Jr., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Fielding, the White House counsel, said the administration was prepared to produce e-mail from the national committee, but only as part of a 'carefully and thoughtfully considered package of accommodations' -- in other words, only as part of the offer for Mr. Rove and the others to appear in private.

"Mr. Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, issued a tart reply: 'The White House position seems to be that executive privilege not only applies in the Oval Office, but to the R.N.C. as well. There is absolutely no basis in law or fact for such a claim.'"

Stolberg also discloses the existence of yet a third e-mail account used by Rove, this one "a private domain account that is registered to the political consulting company he once owned."

Unifying Scandal Theory

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."