According to the Washington watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, “the Executive Office of the President had lost over five million emails generated between March 2003 and October 2005.”
Ralston had two accounts hosted on RNC servers: SRalston@georgewbush.com and sralston@rnchq.com. According to an investigation by the House Committee on Oversight, Ralston told Abramoff and two of his colleagues at Greenberg Traurig, to use her RNC accounts as well as her private AOL account.
According to a March 2007 letter sent to the White House by Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight, Ralston asked two Abramoff associates at Greenberg Traurig to use her RNC account because there are no “security issues like my WH email.”
“Susan Ralston, who was Karl Rove's executive assistant, invited two lobbyists working for Jack Abramoff to use her RNC e-mail account to avoid "security issues" with the White House e-mail system, writing: "I now have an RNC blackberry which you can use to e-mail me at any time. No security issues like my WH email,” the report said.
In another email exchange, this one directly with Abramoff, Ralston alerted him to do the same in the event that she could not be reached on her AOL account.
“Ms. Ralston similarly wrote Mr. Abramoff: "I know [sic] have an RNC laptop at the office for political use,” the report added. “I can access my AOL email when necessary so if you need to send me something that I need to read, you can send to my AOL email and then call or page me to check it.”
Of the emails that were preserved by the RNC, only 130 emails sent to Rove were provided to the Committee and none of them prior to 2005, despite Rove sending email through RNC servers 95 percent of the time.
Federal authorities were already investigating Abramoff in 2005, the point at which all emails were deleted by the RNC. The “agreement” email acquired by RAW STORY is dated at 2001, suggesting that the bulk of correspondences between Abramoff and Ralston would have taken place between 2001-2005.
In 2006, Abramoff plead guilty to several counts of bribing political officials and defrauding his American Indian tribal clients. That same year, Ralston – who resigned from her White House post in 2005 – started a lobbying firm called SBR Enterprises, LLC. SBR Enterprises is registered in Virginia.
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