White House staff destroyed FIVE MILLION e-mails

AMERICAblog links to this report from CREW:

Through two confidential sources, CREW learned that the Executive Office of the President (EOP) has lost over FIVE MILLION emails generated between March 2003 and October 2005. The White House counsel’s office was advised of these problems in 2005 and CREW has been told that the White House was given a plan of action to recover these emails, but to date nothing has been done to rectify this significant loss of records.

Our Executive Director, Melanie Sloan, issued the following statement after learning of the revelation:

It’s clear that the White House has been willfully violating the law, the only question now is to what extent? The ever changing excuses offered by the administration – that they didn’t want to violate the Hatch Act, that staff wasn’t clear on the law – are patently ridiculous. Very convenient that embarrassing – and potentially incriminating – emails have gone missing. It’s the Nixon White House all over again.

Couple of quibbles.

First, the the lawlessnes of the Nixon White House couldn't compare to the lawlessness of this one. The Bush administration operates with a disregard for the rule of law that Richard Nixon never dreamed of in his wildest authoritarian fantasies.

Furthermore, both CREW and AMERICAblog make the mistake of adopting White House language with regard to this scandal. John Aravosis writes (empahses added):

You know that a lot of those missing e-mails are things they don't want us to ever see. What a coincidence that they started losing those e-mails in March of 2003, right when the Iraq war was starting.

The e-mails in question were not "lost" and they are not "missing." Those e-mails were destroyed. The Bush administration engaged in a systematic effort to conceal official communications from public scrutiny by circumventing the appropriate communication medium and then by destroying the communications themselves. This is a black-letter violation of the Presidential Records Act. The sheer volume of the destroyed records makes it impossible for the administration to argue convincingly that the destruction of these records was either incidental or accidental. And anyone who suggests that the destruction of these records was completely innocent is either a fool or a Republican.

The congress must subpoena the computers and servers of the RNC, as well as every RNC-issued laptop and BlackBerry that was used for communcations with the Bush administration. The American people need and deserve to know what their government has been doing. What we know already is disturbing enough, but we have to know how far it goes.

Meanwhile, as I write this, MSNBC is doing another Don Imus scandal live shot, FOX "News" is teasing a report in the next segment about American Idol, and CNN's Newsroom is talking about potty breaks for air traffic controllers.