Oversight Committee to limit RNC e-mail request Michael Roston

Published: Monday June 4, 2007 Print This Email This Rep. Henry Waxman's House Committee on Oversight and Government reform is close to reaching a deal that would limit the scope of its probe into e-mail accounts maintained by the Republican National Committee and used by White House employees, according to a report in today's edition of Roll Call. "Just prior to the Memorial Day recess, ranking member Tom Davis (R-Va.) and other committee Republicans urged Waxman to scale back his request for documents from the RNC," wrote Paul Singer in Monday morning's paper. "While the Republicans wrote that Waxmans inquiries into the political use of government resources 'constitute legitimate exercises of the committees oversight authority,' they argued that the breadth of the committees requests and subpoenas 'far exceed the legitimate needs of the committee.'" The exchange between House Democratic and Republican members of the committee was prompted by the briefings of General Services Administration staff by the White House earlier in the year. Democratic committee members are worried that the White House was seeking to use GSA contracting to assist Republican political campaigns in 2008. At issue in particular were "daily tallies of the number of e-mails to and from each RNC account maintained by a White House employee," which Republican staff insisted would not help the Democratic side of the committee gain more information about the White House's briefings. However, a Democratic staffer told Singer that he was optimistic that the limitation on the search would not hurt the probe because "The RNC has since provided data about the account users and the number of messages." Noting that the RNC has complied with most committee requests to date, Singer also reported that Republicans were concerned about the cost to the party from cooperating with the probe. "Several Republican sources put the price tag thus far at 'hundreds of thousands of dollars,' though none could provide a more specific tally," Singer reports. The full article is accessible at the Roll Call website.



