By Tom Hamburger, The Los Angeles Times<\/p>\n
The White House said Wednesday that it may have lost what could amount to thousands of messages sent through a private e-mail system used by political guru Karl Rove and at least 50 other top officials, an admission that stirred anger and dismay among congressional investigators.<\/p>\n
The e-mails were considered potentially crucial evidence in congressional inquiries launched by Democrats into the role partisan politics may have played in such policy decisions as the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.<\/p>\n
The White House said an effort was underway to see whether the messages could be recovered from the computer system, which was operated and paid for by the Republican National Committee as part of an avowed effort to separate political communications from those dealing with official business.<\/p>\n
“The White House has not done a good enough job overseeing staff using political e-mail accounts to assure compliance with the Presidential Records Act,” White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said in an unusual late-afternoon teleconference with reporters.<\/p>\n
As a result, Stanzel said, “we may not have preserved all e-mails that deal with White House business.”<\/p>\n
He refused to estimate how many e-mails may have been lost, but the system was used by dozens of officials for more than six years.<\/p>\n
(Original Article)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Tom Hamburger, The Los Angeles Times The White House said Wednesday that it may have lost what could amount to thousands of messages sent through a private e-mail system used by political guru Karl Rove and at least 50 other top officials, an admission that stirred anger and dismay among congressional investigators. The e-mails…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[122,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bush_era","category-impeachment-evidence"],"yoast_head":"\n