Democrats call Tony Snow's Clinton-era White House e-mail allegations 'untrue' Michael Roston

Published: Wednesday June 20, 2007 Print This Email This When asked Monday whether officials in the Bush White House had destroyed presidential records by failing to archive e-mails sent over Republican National Committee accounts, Press Secretary Tony Snow said that the current administration's preservation efforts were no different from those used by the administration of Bill Clinton. However, the Democratic National Committee begged to differ. "That's simply untrue," Stacie Paxton, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee, told RAW STORY in a Tuesday phone call. "Clinton White House officials did not have DNC e-mail accounts." Paxton was contradicting Tony Snow's remarks in his Monday press conference. "Those email accounts were set up...on a model based on the prior administration, which had done it the same way, in order to try to avoid Hatch Act violations," Snow said in his Monday press briefing. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform published a study on Monday that showed that 88 White House officials had used Republican National Committee-supplied e-mail accounts, and that all e-mail from 51 of those accounts had been destroyed. The RNC's policy was to archive e-mails for only 30 days. White House Deputy Chief of Staff and top Bush adviser Karl Rove is one official who has heavily used his RNC e-mail account. "The RNC has preserved only 130 e-mails sent to Mr. Rove during the entire first term," the House Oversight Committee report noted. Contrasted with Rove's reported e-mail use, the report pointed to 'extensive' destruction of presidential records. "Mr. Rove frequently sent more than 100 e-mails per day through his RNC e-mail account and received more than 200 per day," it said. One former Clinton employee argued that Snow's suggestion that the Bush administration's e-mail policy is on par with the presidential records preservation of the previous White House didn't hold up. "If we received a phone call and took notes, that was a presidential record, and you couldn't throw it out. That's the simplest, most easy standard, and that approach was taken, I think, throughout," said Jonathan Gill, who helped spearhead the Clinton White House's electronic publishing efforts from 1993-95. Gill acknowledged that he couldn't speak directly to e-mail preservation other than his own under President Clinton's White House, but said there was a heavy awareness of documents preservation in those years. "If they were concerned enough to advise mid-level employees like me, if they were concerned enough to give explicit instructions about pink phone message slips, I think it reflects the level of care and attention to detail that we tried to maintain," the former Clinton White House employee argued. "I'm sure we had lapses, everyone does, but we sure tried hard." On Wednesday, Amanda Terkel of Think Progress published a memo written by former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta in 1993 which ordered the preservation of all electronic records as well. "No word processing or e-mail document that is a Presidential record should be deleted unless it has been (a) printed and placed in an appropriate file, or (b) preserved in an appropriate electronic system," the memo states. The policy of the Bush White House appears to have gone beyond Podesta's orders, accounting for the possibility that non-White House e-mail accounts might be used by White House employees for official business. "[I]f you happen to receive an e-mail on a personal e-mail account that otherwise qualifies as a Presidential record, it is your duty to ensure that it is preserved and filed as such by printing it out and saving it or by forwarding it to your White House e-mail account," wrote then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales in a February 2001 memo excerpted by the Oversight Committee in Monday's report. Snow's reference to the Clinton administration's e-mail preservation policies was not the first effort by Republicans to shift attention away from the destroyed RNC e-mail records and onto the previous White House. In an April 25 hearing of the Oversight Committee reported on by RAW STORY , Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) sought to subpoena Clinton-era e-mails from the Democratic National Committee. The subpoena was not approved by the committee.



