Bush: Felon In Chief

TalkLeft gives you more details about the "Karl Rove-Ken Mehlman/Official White House email sent out over Republican National Committee servers/incoming and outgoing email messages for 51 out of 87 different White House/government appointees purged" brouhaha.

Or, as Bush and Cheney (AND U.S. ASSAttorney General Alberto Gonzales) like to say,"WHAT U.S. Constitution? WHOSE Bill of Rights? WHAT planet are you on where you think this administration is accountable to anyone? The Presidential Records Act, like the Geneva Conventions, is quaint and not to be worried about. Go f*** yourself!"

Missing Rove Emails Show How The Bushies Hijacked American Democracy And Accountability to Citizens

Here's the piece at Truthout, but I'd call it more like treason that a mere violation of the records act.

Three years ago, Robert Luskin, the attorney who defended White House Political Adviser Karl Rove in the CIA leak case, made a startling discovery: a July 2003 email Rove sent to then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley that proved Rove was far more involved in the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, and the campaign to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, than he had let on during interviews with federal investigators and in testimony before a federal grand jury.

Curiously, the email Rove sent to Hadley that Luskin had found never turned up during an exhaustive document search ordered a year earlier, in September 2003, by Alberto Gonzales. At the time, Gonzales, who was White House counsel, enjoined all White House staff members to turn over any communications pertaining to Plame Wilson and her husband, a vocal critic of the Iraq war, who had accused the Bush administration of twisting pre-war Iraq intelligence. Gonzales's order to turn over documents and emails came 12 hours after former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card had informed him that the Justice Department was launching an investigation into the leak.

The order Gonzales sent to Karl Rove and other administration officials demanded "documents that relate in any way to a contact with any member or representative of the news media about Joseph C. Wilson, his trip to Niger in February 2002, or his wife's purported relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency."

The Rove/Hadley email was not included in the thousands of pages of documents turned over to the FBI. The reason? Apparently the "right search words weren't used," Luskin told Newsweek in October 2005. The email Rove sent to Hadley in July 2003 has never been released publicly. It's unclear whether the email was sent via the White House computer system or from Rove's email account maintained by the Republican National Committee (RNC), which, according to the National Journal, is what Rove uses to conduct 90 percent of his White House business, in what would appear to be a violation of the Presidential Records Act.

Note to Bushies: Where Have All The Federal Documents Gone?

Anyone who has ever worked in any kind of office knows that documents go missing occasionally. When the "office" is the federal government, the bureaucracy alone raises the amount of missing records exponentially high.

But what we're seeing today among the Bush Administration is a not just astounding but downright frightening and yes, criminal and deliberate loss of any document, file, record, or "fact" that the Bushies don't like or want others to see. This is not just me stating this: we've been hearing this for years from citizen and taxpayer organizations, from lawyers and constitutional and federal experts, from scientists and academicians, and even from Bush supporters and righties as well as from Bush haters and lefties.

As reported last night by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC's Countdown program, there are scads of cases before the courts right now that show a global-sized laundry list of documents, records, emails, and other material required by law (and in some cases, the Constitution) to be kept and maintained safely and openly by the U.S. government that have been reported "missing" from the White House and other Bush- and GOP-led organizations.

Some of these you already know about, like the "sudden" disappearance of George W. Bush's National Guard records which Bush has claimed (if only these silly documents weren't somehow eaten by the government dog) would show he faithfully fulfilled his military service since he was able to slide off from having to serve in the Vietnam War. That we have documents that show just the opposite - that Bush partied/drank/drugged his way through what little service he performed - are not supposed to be believed; no, we're supposed to believe what he (a serial liar) says about files the people on HIS watch magically "lost."

Also among the lost is much of the evidence the feds supposedly built against "terror" suspect Jose Padilla (seems like important data to lose, no?) as well as countless other never-charged detainees at Gitmo and elsewhere.

We also have many thousands of supposedly "lost" emails that reference the firing of federal prosecutors case (aka GonzalesGate or AttorneyGate or GonzoGate) with heavy White House involvement.

And I could literally go forward for the next few days just listing here the documents we "know" (because the government has claimed so) have been lost on the Bush Administration's watch.

How damned convenient. And criminal.

It's Bush's Way Or The (Hell) Highway

From Stranger at Blah3:

One step closer to Constitutional Crisis. They ain't budging.

White House Counsel Fred Fielding, in a letter today, told Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairmen of the House and Senate Judiciary committees, that the White House has not budged in its refusal to allow the panels to question several White House aides, including Karl Rove, about what they know regarding the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys, moving the two sides closer to a constitutional battle over the scandal.

Fielding also appears to be trying to head off an attempt by Conyers to obtain e-mails and documents from the Republican National Committee regarding the firings. Roughly 50 White House officials, including 22 curent aides, used e-mail accounts controlled by the RNC to send messages, including some related to the prosecutor firings, and Conyers asked RNC Chairman Mike Duncan to turn over those records today.

Fielding also said that "it was and remains our intention to collect e-mails and documents from those accounts as well as the official White House e-mail and document retention systems" as part of a broader deal with the two committees on staffer testimony.

Fielding has offered to allow Rove, former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and other Bush aides to be questioned by committee investigators, but only behind closed doors, and not under oath. Fielding also won't allow any transcript of those interviews to be made. Conyers and Leahy have rejected the offer as woefully inadequate, and while both committees have authorized subpoenas for Rove, Miers and the others, only Conyers has issued up until now and those were for documents only.

Presidential temper tantrum?