'Emailgate' puts White House under siege

The White House is locked in a new battle with the Democrat-controlled Congress–this time over charges it is withholding, and may have destroyed, compromising emails that Congress is seeking as it investigates alleged wrongdoing by the Bush administration. The new battle between the executive and legislative branches stems from the dispute over the eight federal prosecutors who were dismissed last November, in what Democrats say is a blatant example of political meddling in the judicial system by the White House. The affair already threatens to bring down Alberto Gonzales, the attorney general, accused of turning a blind eye as Karl Rove–the influential political adviser to President Bush–and other White House officials schemed with their opposite numbers at the Justice Department to have the prosecutors removed. But the affair has gained a new dimension with evidence that Rove and some of his colleagues may have deliberately used Republican party email accounts instead of the White House system to send messages relating to the attorneys and other controversial issues. These messages, Democrats suspect, may have been deleted–thus circumventing rules that White House and government emails must be preserved. Responding to the Democrats' charges, the White House spokeswoman Dana Perino insisted every effort was being made to recover the missing emails. But that did not satisfy an angry Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who accused the administration of lying. "You can't erase emails, not today," Leahy thundered from the Senate floor. "They've gone through too many servers. The emails are there, they just don't want to produce them. It's like the infamous 18-minute gap in the Nixon White House tapes." The reference was to a missing crucial portion of Oval Office conversations between President Richard Nixon and his aides. To general disbelief and much derision, the White House insisted the 18 minutes in question had been accidentally erased by Rosemary Woods, Nixon's personal secretary–in what became known as "the Rosemary Woods stretch." For once, the "gate" appendage to a potential scandal here is not out of place. The stakes may not be as high as in the original Watergate scandal but some of the same issues are involved. Today, the fight is over possibly incriminating emails; in 1973 and 1974 it was over the release of the "smoking gun" tapes that ultimately sealed Nixon's fate. More broadly, the argument again raises the issue of executive privilege, which the Supreme Court rejected when it ordered the hand over of the Watergate tapes to Congress. But in its obsessive secrecy, the present White House outstrips even the Nixon administration, arguing–so far mostly successfully–that without the assurance of confidentiality, it is unable to get the frank advice it needs to govern effectively. The current confrontation also may yet go all the way to the Supreme Court. The biggest clash yet will come next week, as Gonzales fights for his survival in a grilling by the Senate Judiciary Committee over the fired attorneys. Bush is standing behind his long-time aide but anything less than a stellar performance is likely to force Gonzales' resignation–already being demanded by several senior Republicans as well as Democrats. Old controversies are also being revisited. A House committee has scheduled a hearing next week and wants Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to testify about bogus pre-Iraq War claims that Saddam Hussein had sought to buy uranium from Niger.