Bush White House email controversy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The
Bush White House email controversy surfaced in 2007 during the
controversy involving the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys. Congressional requests for administration documents while investigating the dismissals of the U.S. attorneys required the Bush administration to reveal that not all internal
White House emails were available, because they were sent via a non-government domain hosted on an email server not controlled by the federal government. Conducting governmental business in this manner is a possible violation of the
Presidential Records Act of 1978, and the
Hatch Act.
[1] Over 5 million emails may have been lost.
[2][3] Greg Palast claims to have come up with 500 of the
Karl Rove emails, leading to damaging allegations.
[4] In 2009, it was announced that as many as 22 million emails may have been lost.
[5]
The administration officials had been using a private Internet domain, called gwb43.com, owned by and hosted on an email server run by the
Republican National Committee,
[6] for various communications of unknown content or purpose. The domain name is an abbreviation for "
George W. Bush, 43rd"
President of the United States. The server came public when it was discovered that
J. Scott Jennings, the White House's deputy director of political affairs, was using a gwb43.com email address to discuss the firing of the U.S. attorney for Arkansas.
[7] Communications by federal employees were also found on georgewbush.com (registered to "Bush-Cheney '04, Inc."
[8]) and rnchq.org (registered to "Republican National Committee"
[9]), but, unlike these two servers, gwb43.com has no
Web server connected to it — it is used only for email.
[10]
The "gwb43.com" domain name was publicized by
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), who sent a letter to
Oversight and Government Reform Committee committee chairman
Henry A. Waxman requesting an investigation.
[11] Waxman sent a formal warning to the RNC, advising them to retain copies of all emails sent by White House employees. According to Waxman, "in some instances, White House officials were using nongovernmental accounts specifically to avoid creating a record of the communications."
[12] The Republican National Committee claims to have erased the emails, supposedly making them unavailable for Congressional investigators.
[13]