Washington – Presidential adviser Karl Rove sent more than 140,000 e-mails through the Republican National Committee’s computer system, circumventing a federal law intended to guarantee the preservation of presidential records, House of Representatives investigators have concluded.
While 88 White House aides used the back-channel system, Rove was its biggest user at the White House, and more than half of his communications dealt with official business, according to an interim report by the House Oversight Committee.
The White House initially had said that about 50 presidential aides used the Republican Party e-mail system to avoid sending political messages improperly through the White House system, which is supposed to be reserved for official government business.
Although 140,216 of Rove’s e-mails have been preserved, committee investigators found that e-mails from 51 of the 88 White House aides who used the back-channel message system appear to have been destroyed.
The 1978 Presidential Records Act requires the White House to preserve official documents. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who was White House counsel at the time, may have known about the White House aides’ use of the RNC e-mail system, but he took no action to stop destruction of the records, the report said.
A Republican Party spokeswoman dismissed the committee report as “political spin.”
