Obama administration tries to kill BushCo e-mail case

By GottaLaff

Am I missing something here? If this is accurate, then I'll need a talking down. A big one:

The Obama administration, siding with former President George W. Bush, is trying to kill a lawsuit that seeks to recover what could be millions of missing White House e-mails.

Two advocacy groups suing the Executive Office of the President say that large amounts of White House e-mail documenting Bush's eight years in office may still be missing, and that the government must undertake an extensive recovery effort. They expressed disappointment that Obama's Justice Department is continuing the Bush administration's bid to get the lawsuits dismissed.

Here is the back story.

Recently, the Bush White House said it had located 14 million e-mails that were misplaced and that the White House had restored hundreds of thousands of other e-mails from computer backup tapes.

The steps the White House took are inadequate, one of the two groups, the National Security Archive, told a federal judge in court papers filed Friday.

"We do not know how many more e-mails could be restored but have not been, because defendants have not looked," the National Security Archive said in the court papers.

"The new administration seems no more eager than the last" to deal with the issue, said Anne Weismann, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the other group that sued the EOP.

Say it ain't so, Joe... and Barack.

Bush III/Cheney II: Palin's missing e-mails

By GottaLaff

Let me preface this post with the following: I've been at work for a few hours and came back to Comments that suggested we write about Sarah Palin because she scares us. No. Please, give us a little more credit than that.

Want to know why I write about her? First, because when we look to our news sources, she is what we find 90% of the time.

But the other reason is this: She's half of the team we're up against. The popular half. During the primaries, it was all McCain/Mitt/Thompson/Giuliani posts all the time, and there were no complaints. Now it's about Palin, because she's new and a lot of information is coming out about her, nearly hourly. There are only so many Obama videos we can put up.

Being afraid is a lot different than going on the offensive. If that's a problem for some of you, then by all means, skip this post. Bush III/CheneyII:

Via Huffington Post. From the “Where Have We Heard This Before?” file, Mother Jones reports that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is withholding more than 1,000 emails from its response to an open records request from Andrée McLeod, a “self-described independent government watchdog.”

From the Mother Jones blog:

[McLeod] requested copies of all the emails that had been sent and received by Ivy Frye and Frank Bailey, two top aides to Palin, from February through April of this year. McLeod, a 53-year-old registered Republican who has held various jobs in state government, suspected that Frye and Bailey had engaged in political activity during official business hours in that period by participating in a Palin-backed effort to oust the state chairman of the Alaska Republican Party, Randy Ruedrich. (Bailey has been in the national news of late for refusing to cooperate with investigators probing whether Palin fired Alaska’s public safety commission because he did not dismiss a state trooper who had gone through an ugly divorce with Palin’s sister.)

McLeod received four boxes of emails, which did not contain evidence of the wrongdoing McLeod suspected.

But more intriguing than any email correspondence contained in the four boxes was what was not released: about 1.100 emails. Palin’s office provided McLeod with a 78-page list (PDF) cataloging the emails it was withholding. Many of them had been written by Palin or sent to her. Palin’s office claimed most of the undisclosed emails were exempt from release because they were covered by the “executive” or “deliberative process” privileges that protect communications between Palin and her aides about policy matters.

But the subject lines of some of the withheld emails suggest they were not related to policy matters. Several refer to one of Palin’s political foes, others to a well-known Alaskan journalist. Moreover, some of the withhold emails were CC’ed to Todd Palin, the governor’s husband. Todd Palin—a.k.a. the First Dude—holds no official state position (though he has been a close and influential adviser for Gov. Palin). The fact that Palin and her aides shared these emails with a citizen outside the government undercuts the claim that they must be protected under executive privilege.

Palin’s non-compliance with the open government laws of her home state would appear to run counter to the McCain campaign’s espoused platform of reform and transparent government.

According to Sunshine Review, a Website advocating open government, a 2007 review by the Better Government Assn. and the National Freedom of Information Coalition gave Alaska a score of three — out of a possible 100 — for its responsiveness to freedom-of-information requests. Of course, Palin was in office for less than a year when that study was completed, but given that she is presenting herself as a government reformer, one would expect her to hold herself to a higher standard than that of her predecessors.

After years of the Bush administration’s stonewalling on the fate of millions of internal emails, Palin’s behavior as governor should probably raise some eyebrows.

I will not ignore stories about somebody who may become the next president of the United States, should the (god forbid) president die. I will, however, continue to push the meme Bush III/Cheney II. Hopefully, it will catch on.