RNC e-mails itself into trouble

I sympathize with Republicans on this one.

Several senior White House Republicans were given Republican National Committee laptops and pagers to use alongside their government-issued equipment, an effort to avoid charges that government gear was used for campaign purposes.

But recent revelations in the Scooter Libby trial and the fired prosecutors brouhaha suggest that the computers may have been used to keep sensitive information out of official government archives.

"The system was created with the best intentions," said former Assistant White House Press Secretary Adam Levine, who was assigned an RNC laptop and BlackBerry when he worked at the White House in 2002. But, he added, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, last week formally requested access to broad categories of RNC-White House e-mails.

Waxman told the Los Angeles Times in a statement that a separate "e-mail system for high-ranking White House officials would raise serious questions about violations of the Presidential Records Act," which requires the preservation and ultimate disclosure of e-mails about official government business.

It's easy to see how something like that could happen inadvertently. You're e-mailing back and forth during the day -- sometimes official business, sometimes party business. It can be hard to keep things straight, and be rigorous about when to use which e-mail account. I blog under a pseudonym, and there have been several times when I almost sent out a personal e-mail from my blog e-mail address, and vice versa.

It's a problem that's only going to get worse, with the proliferation of instant messaging and text messaging and all the other ways we have of communicating. Someday a war will be started entirely through IM, I'm sure of it, with the final line being "That's it! Look out ur wndw, @zzh@t. Whos laffing now?"

That said, having set up the parallel systems, it was incumbent on the administration to make sure they were used properly. Preservation of government records is no small thing. So at a minimum, the administration was careless and deserves to endure some scrutiny and bad press to ensure they fix the problem.

Worst case would be if they deliberately used alternate e-mail addresses to get around the records laws and try to avoid accountability. That would go beyond careless and into real scandal territory. There's as yet no proof that that's the case, but there is once again enough smoke to warrant an investigation. If nothing else, we want to be sure that the official communications are properly recovered and archived for posterity.

There's a limit to what sort of probe should be allowed, though. Waxman is essentially asking to look at internal RNC communications, which would be like the Soviet Union having a mole in the CIA Director's office. The administration has only itself to blame for muddying the communication waters; but any subpoena request should be narrowly crafted to find only misdirected government communications, and not turn into a license to tromp through the RNC's databases.

politics, midtopia