Karl Rove and his aides at the White House have regularly used email accounts provided by the Republican National Committee to send and receive emails that should have been sent and received on the official White House system under the Presidential Records Act. When Sen. Leahy asked Taylor about this, she said that the email system had been created in order to avoid violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits the use of government resources for political means.
That’s true, of course, except that Rove and his aides seem to have used the RNC emails for just about everything, regardless of whether it was a political matter. When Leahy pressed Taylor as to why she’d emailed Justice Department aide Kyle Sampson about the replacement of U.S. attorneys using her RNC account, Taylor answered that she’d done it as “someone trying to be efficient with their time.” If so, Rove’s shop must have been very efficient.