Friday, February 20, 2009

File this under H for Hypocrisy

From think progress title orignal:

Now Issa cares about taking extra measures to preserve White House e-mails.'">Now Issa cares about taking extra measures to preserve White House e-mails.»

In a letter to White House Counsel Gregory Craig today, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the ranking Republican on the House Oversight Committee, “called on President Obama to put in place a system that ensures all White House emails be preserved even if official business was done through private e- mail accounts.” This newfound interest in the use of outside e-mail accounts at the White House is ironic, considering his dismissal of such concerns when Democrats investigated the Bush administration’s use of RNC e-mail accounts:

Republicans accused the Democrats of pursuing the investigation simply to dig up dirt on Rove and waste hundreds of thousands of dollars of money that the RNC could be using to shore up its candidates’ campaigns.

“Are we simply going on a fishing expedition at $40,000 to $50,000 a month?” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) asked National Archives and White House officials at the hearing. “Do any of you know of a single document, because this committee doesn’t, that should’ve been in the archives but in fact was done at the RNC?”

In 2007, the House Oversight Committee discovered that at least 88 Bush White House officials, including former adviser Karl Rove and former chief of staff Andrew Card, had RNC e-mail accounts. Additionally, the RNC has preserved no e-mails for 51 officials and had major gaps in the e-mail records of the 37 White House officials for whom the RNC did preserve e-mails.

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