April 14, 2007 05:50 PM UTC

Doesn't Mike Merrifield Just Wish

• 4 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

There are all kinds of interesting parallels to draw between the recent scandal surrounding disclosure of Mike Merrifield’s incendiary “special place in hell” email and the scandal in Washington, DC involving emails sent by presidential advisor Karl Rove.

On the Rove email scandal, CNN reports the latest:

Millions of White House e-mails may be missing, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino acknowledged Friday.

“I wouldn’t rule out that there were a potential 5 million e-mails lost,” Perino told reporters.

The administration was already facing sharp questions about whether top presidential advisers including Karl Rove improperly used Republican National Committee e-mail that the White House said later disappeared.

The latest comments were a response to a new report from a liberal watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), alleging that over a two-year period official White House e-mail traffic for hundreds of days has vanished — in possible violation of the federal Presidential Records Act…

It seems pretty clear that these millions of emails from both servers, government-owned and private, were not deleted “accidentally.” Another interesting aside, as most of you know, CREW is the national parent of Colorado’s own CCEG.

Here in Colorado, emails pertaining to official business are covered, regardless of who owns the servers, by the Colorado Open Records Act. In practice, though, officials are more or less on their honor to sort “public” from private material when served with a CORA request–the CBI doesn’t show up and cart away hard drives or anything.

Many state agencies do use government hosted email systems that have their own server-based archives for records retention. Not so with actual legislators, for reasons apparently related to laziness on the part of Capitol IT staff and the technical incompetence of many legislators–their “official” email addresses are set to forward into personal email boxes. Many of these are Hotmail, Yahoo!, and other free webmail systems, where storage space is limited and permanently deleting emails at some point is basically mandatory.

This, in addition to complicating CORA requests by necessitating much more sorting of CORA-able from private messages, makes an effective retention policy for their “official” email more or less impossible…

What we’re saying is that because they run everything on the cheap under the Gold Dome, what may be the most important emails to legally preserve (that is, to and from elected officials) are all over the place with no unified archive of the kind they had to make “disappear” from the White House in high scandal. Who needs to make hard drives sleep with the fishes when Hotmail gives you the perfect alibi?

Rove is covered by a different and more enforceable federal law in this case, but our situation would still be his loophole-riddled wet dream. Maybe the title of this post should be “Doesn’t Karl Rove Just Wish,” although Merrifield would probably disagree.

In fact, Merrifield got nailed pretty hard despite Colorado’s loose system–however deserved, a spectacle that might not necessarily be repeated…