In letters sent Monday to the RNC and the Bush/Cheney 2004 Campaign, Congressman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, urged the two groups to preserve all emails sent by White House officials from their servers, because of their relevance to the US attorney scandal.
One email the Justice Department released Friday to a Congressional committee shows that J. Scott Jennings, special assistant to President Bush and deputy director for political affairs, used an sjennings@gwb43.com email account to query a DOJ official about the pending US attorney vacancies.
"Does a list of vacant, or about-to-be-vacant, US attorney slots exist anywhere?" Jennings wrote in a December 3, 2006 email to Kyle Sampson, former chief of staff to Attorney General Gonzales. Gonzales is said to have approved the firings of eight US attorneys in what appears to be a politically motivated plot. Jennings' immediate boss is Karl Rove, White House political adviser, who, according to a report Friday in the National Journal, conducts 95 percent of White House business using an email account maintained by the RNC.
"My office. Want me to sent [sic] to you tomorrow?" Sampson replied to Jennings' private sjennings@gwb43.com account. Four days after the email was sent, the DOJ fired seven US attorneys. Earlier another US attorney had been fired. The firings have since been revealed as part of a plan that had been in the making for more than two years and was executed with the knowledge of White House officials, including Rove and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers. Both Rove and Miers have been asked to testify under oath before Congress about the firings, whether the action was politically motivated, and the roles they played in the firings.
Waxman said that in certain cases White House officials were using alternative email accounts to avoid creating an automatic paper trail of their communications about hot-button political issues.
Taken as a whole, Jennings' use of an outside email account to query Sampson on the status of the purge, and the creation of a five-point plan which stated that if pushed by lawmakers to justify the dismissals, DOJ officials should mislead lawmakers and say that each termination "is based on a thorough review of US attorneys' performance," would seem to suggest there were other reasons behind the firings. That is what Congress is trying to determine.
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Truthout reporter Matt Renner contributed to this report.
One email the Justice Department released Friday to a Congressional committee shows that J. Scott Jennings, special assistant to President Bush and deputy director for political affairs, used an sjennings@gwb43.com email account to query a DOJ official about the pending US attorney vacancies.
"Does a list of vacant, or about-to-be-vacant, US attorney slots exist anywhere?" Jennings wrote in a December 3, 2006 email to Kyle Sampson, former chief of staff to Attorney General Gonzales. Gonzales is said to have approved the firings of eight US attorneys in what appears to be a politically motivated plot. Jennings' immediate boss is Karl Rove, White House political adviser, who, according to a report Friday in the National Journal, conducts 95 percent of White House business using an email account maintained by the RNC.
"My office. Want me to sent [sic] to you tomorrow?" Sampson replied to Jennings' private sjennings@gwb43.com account. Four days after the email was sent, the DOJ fired seven US attorneys. Earlier another US attorney had been fired. The firings have since been revealed as part of a plan that had been in the making for more than two years and was executed with the knowledge of White House officials, including Rove and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers. Both Rove and Miers have been asked to testify under oath before Congress about the firings, whether the action was politically motivated, and the roles they played in the firings.
Taken as a whole, Jennings' use of an outside email account to query Sampson on the status of the purge, and the creation of a five-point plan which stated that if pushed by lawmakers to justify the dismissals, DOJ officials should mislead lawmakers and say that each termination "is based on a thorough review of US attorneys' performance," would seem to suggest there were other reasons behind the firings. That is what Congress is trying to determine.
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Truthout reporter Matt Renner contributed to this report.
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