Washington – The White House’s claim that e-mails sent on a Republican Party account might have been lost was challenged Thursday by Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, who quipped that even his teenage neighbor could find them.
“They say they have not been preserved. I don’t believe that!” Leahy shouted from the Senate floor as the dispute over the firing of federal prosecutors continued at a high pitch.
“You can’t erase e-mails, not today. They’ve gone through too many servers,” said Leahy, D-Vt. “Those e-mails are there, they just don’t want to produce them. We’ll subpoena them if necessary.”
Later, Leahy and his committee’s ranking Republican, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, said the White House and lawmakers should agree on an independent forensic expert to try to recover the messages.
White House officials insisted the administration was making a genuine effort to recover any missing e-mails that had been sent on an account sponsored by the Republican National Committee.
“I understand his point, but he’s wrong,” spokeswoman Dana Perino said of Leahy.
“We’re being very honest and forthcoming,” she added. “I hope that he would understand the spirit in which we have come forward and tried to explain how we screwed up our policy and how we’re working to fix it.”
With five days left before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testifies before Leahy’s committee, fighting to save his job, lawmakers kept up the pressure in the latest dispute to grow out of the Justice Department’s firings of eight federal prosecutors.
Leahy and Specter asked that the White House appoint “a fair and objective process for investigating this matter, including the use of a mutually trusted computer forensic expert.”
Behind closed doors, Judiciary Committee aides from both chambers continued interviews with Justice officials.
The investigation has revealed that White House e-mails about official business – on electronic accounts intended for political matters – may be gone, in violation of a law that requires their preservation. Twenty-two White House officials, including political adviser Karl Rove, have accounts sponsored by the Republican National Committee, administration officials say.
