The Washington Post gives a thorough rundown here.

A shorter rundown would go something like this: the Clinton administration, after getting into trouble over losing some White House emails, had a perfectly good system in place by the end of its term. But the Bushies threw that out the window for no apparent reason when they came in and didn't put anything in its place. Whether deviousness or incompetence is to blame is unclear.

Sometimes it's just too easy.

For months, the White House has battling the D.C. watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington in court. The accusation is pretty straightforward: for more than a year between 2003 and 2005, the White House failed to archive emails, and the group had learned that as many as five million emails were lost as a result. The White House is required by law to retain them. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino responded that there had been a tech glitch: you know, we were transferring from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook and... oops:

Again, I wouldn't rule out that there were a potential 5 million emails lost, but we'll see if we can get to you. If it was 5 million, I think that, again, out of 1,700 people using email every day, again, there was no intent to have lost them.

As the months have worn on, the White House has mounted a much more belligerent response in court. But the decisions -- and the headlines -- have repeatedly gone against them to the point now where it's apparent that not only did they lose the emails, but they copied over the backup tapes as well.

Nevertheless, White House spokesman Tony Fratto sees no reason for contrition. He's a flack in the proud Bush tradition of Ari Fleischer and Tony Snow, and if there's a single tenet to that order, it's that you do not have to admit anything that is the result of deduction. Sure, common sense dictates that if emails have not been archived, and the backup tapes that would have recorded them have been recycled, then those emails are gone forever. But show me the missing emails, Fratto says:

Q Tony, on the subject, could you address the missing White House emails and the law suit? It is a subject of reports this morning. Are there in fact the emails missing? What's the likelihood of their recovery versus the --

MR. FRATTO: I think our review of this, and you saw the court filing on this, and our declaration in response to the judge's questions -- I think to the best of what all the analysis we've been able to do, we have absolutely no reason to believe that any emails are missing; there's no evidence of that....

Q So where are they?

MR. FRATTO: Where are what?

Q Where are part of --

MR. FRATTO: Which email? Look, no one will tell you categorically about any system -- any system, whether it's your system at Bloomberg or our system here at the White House, past and present, categorically that data cannot be missing.... We have no reason to believe that there's any data missing at all -- and we've certainly found no evidence of any data missing.

Of course, now House sleuth Henry Waxman is getting into the act and plans to hold a hearing . So things are going to get worse for the White House before they get better. But nobody can deny their tenacity.

Oops. From the AP:

The White House has acknowledged recycling its backup computer tapes of e-mail before October 2003, raising the possibility that many electronic messages — including those pertaining to the CIA leak case — have been taped over and are gone forever.

The disclosure came minutes before midnight Tuesday under a court-ordered deadline that forced the White House to reveal information it has previously refused to provide.

Among the e-mails that could be lost are messages swapped by any White House officials involved in discussions about leaking a CIA officer's identity to reporters.

Before October 2003, the White House recycled its backup tapes "consistent with industry best practices," according to a sworn statement by a White House aide.

Backup tapes are the last line of defense for saving electronic records.

Update: CREW, which filed the suit, has more on the White House's filing.

Even though Rove's aide Scott Jennings said less than nothing today about the U.S. attorney firings (he wouldn't even testify about emails which had already been turned over to the committee), he did testify about two other areas of interest. One of those concerns the White House's use of Republican National Committee-issued email accounts. A number of aides, including Jennings, violated the Presidential Records Act by using those accounts for official business. The underlying allegation, of course, is that Karl Rove's shop used a kind of off-the-record email system on purpose. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), who's investigating, has called it "the most serious breach of the Presidential Records Act in the 30-year history of the law."

The White House's fig leaf for that has been the Hatch Act, which prohibits using government resources for political activities. Staffers in the White House Office of Political Affairs have both a White House address and computer and a RNC email address and devices. And as Jennings testified today, he frequently used his RNC address for official business (including matters related to the U.S. attorney firings) for "convenience and efficiency." (That's also what Jennings' boss Sara Taylor testified. Rove also found using his RNC blackberry incredibly convenient.) In fact, it sounds like he hardly used his White House address, since he carried an RNC-issued blackberry with him. The problem was not lost on Jennings, apparently, who testified, in response to a question from Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), that he had actually asked for a blackberry for his White House email once.

It was "very early in my employment," he testified, "the President was doing a lot traveling in my region [the South]... I was receiving a lot of email on my official account and I requested [a blackberry for White House email] at that moment, and I was told that it wasn't the custom to give the political affairs staffers those devices."

So even though Jennings was aware that this was a problem and apparently raised the issue with a supervisor, he was told to ignore it. That doesn't quite square with the White House explanation for the illegal use of the RNC accounts, which is "oops."

Third time's the charm? They've asked the White House, the Justice Department, and now Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) and ranking member Arlen Specter (R-PA) are giving Karl Rove's lawyer a try to see if they can get their hands on his emails.

Tired of waiting for a response, Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) issued a subpoena for any of Karl Rove's emails in the Justice Department's possession that might be relevant to the U.S. attorney firings. That includes emails sent from Rove's White House account (which apparently doesn't get much use) and emails from his account issued by the Republican National Committee.

You can see the subpoena here.

Note: Since the subpoena is to the Justice Department and not to the White House, it sidesteps any executive privilege concerns. And it seems possible that it could even claim internal White House emails since the subpoena specifically includes emails that were obtained by Patrick Fitzgerald as part of the Plame investigation.

According to Dana Perino, there's not a thing wrong with the presentations given by Karl Rove and his deputies to agencies throughout the federal government.

Perino was in full spin mode during the White House briefing today, at one point calling a reporter's question about the presentations "ridiculous." As we detailed earlier, the presentations detailed the electoral prospects for Republicans, giving employees the "not-so-subtle" suggestion that they should do what they could to help. It's against the Hatch Act to use government resources for poltical ends, and Rove and his aides seem to have gambled that dropping such hints went right up to the line without crossing it.

According to Perino, the briefings just provided information. And what could be wrong with that?

Q: But why? Why do they [the federal employees] need this information?

Perino: Why are you asking these questions? You’re asking for information as well. I mean, it’s the same thing.

For a fun drinking game, try taking a swig every time Perino says "poltical" or "information" or "landscape" during this Q&A:

Here are all the buzz words tied up into one neat quote:

"There’s nothing wrong with political appointees providing other political appointees with an informational briefing about the political landscape in which they are working.”

The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has just voted 20-8 to authorize subpoenas for both RNC Chairman Mike Duncan and emails held by the RNC. They are set to vote on three more subpoenas this afternoon.

Yesterday, I noted that the Republican National Committee had a choice: turn over Karl Rove's and others' emails to Congress or give them first to the White House for the White House to determine what should be turned over.

The RNC's choice won't shock anyone. From The Washington Post:

"Recognizing the unique and significant nature of the potential privilege issue raised by the committee's requests, the RNC has agreed to the White House's reasonable request," Robert K. Kelner, an RNC lawyer, wrote to Conyers. Conyers responded that the action was "a clear attempt on the administration's part to delay this process."

The White House and Democrats in Congress are both pushing for emails kept by the Republican National Committee, and the RNC is caught in the middle.

The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), wants to get its hands on those RNC-issued email accounts used by Karl Rove and other White House personnel. Congressional investigators want to know about Rove's and his deputy's involvement in the U.S. attorney firings. But the White House insists that it review the emails first, before handing anything over to Democrats. Last week, Conyers warned the RNC not to do that, saying that it would be "an unjustified delay" and "potentially... an obstruction of our investigation."

And today, in a letter to the RNC, the White House made their position clear: you have to give them to us first. There "exists a clear and indisputable Executive Branch interest" in the emails on the RNC-issued accounts, wrote Emmet Flood, Special Counsel to the President.

Conyers isn't buying it:

"The White House's position to clear all RNC emails before they can respond to our request is extreme and unnecessary. This is a clear attempt, on the Administration's part, to delay this process and keep the wheels of Justice turning slowly."

What happens next? I don't know.

Whoops. From the AP:

Karl Rove's lawyer on Friday dismissed the notion that President Bush's chief political adviser intentionally deleted his own e-mails from a Republican sponsored server, saying Rove believed the communications were being preserved in accordance with the law....

"His understanding starting very, very early in the administration was that those e-mails were being archived," Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, said.

The prosecutor probing the Valerie Plame spy case saw and copied all of Rove's e-mails from his various accounts after searching Rove's laptop, his home computer, and the handheld computer devices he used for both the White House and Republican National Committee, Luskin said.

The prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, subpoenaed the e-mails from the White House, the RNC and Bush's re-election campaign, he added.

"There's never been any suggestion that Fitzgerald had anything less than a complete record," Luskin said.

Any e-mails Rove deleted were the type of routine deletions people make to keep their inboxes orderly, Luskin said. He said Rove had no idea the e-mails were being deleted from the server, a central computer that managed the e-mail.

Yesterday, I posted on CREW's revelation that there were as many as five million emails missing from the White House's system. These were emails totally separate from the emails on RNC-issued email accounts. They were in the White House system.

Today, during the White House press gaggle, Dana Perino gave an explanation of sorts:

But there was a conversion sometime between 2002 and 2003 to convert people that were using Lotus Notes when we first arrived to Microsoft Outlook. And I know that the tech people worked to get us all transferred over. We had to save our Word documents and all to make sure that they weren't lost in that transition.

I don't have a specific number for you. Again, I wouldn't rule out that there were a potential 5 million emails lost, but we'll see if we can get to you. If it was 5 million, I think that, again, out of 1,700 people using email every day, again, there was no intent to have lost them.

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You can read the letter White House counsel Fred Fielding sent last night to Congress about the U.S. attorneys investigation here.

But here's the shorter version of the "offer":

Dear Congress,

You'll get what we want you to get when we want you to get it, or you'll get nothing.

Best,
Fred Fielding

In the letter, Fielding says that the White House's offer of March 20th stands. It's a great offer, he says. And carping from Democrats and some Republicans like Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) about it fails "to credit fully the extraordinary nature of the disclosure we are prepared to provide."

The offer, remember, was 1) to turn over records of all relevant communications from a White House official to a party outside the White House (but no internal communications are to be turned over) and 2) Karl Rove and other White House officials would meet with Congress privately, but there would be no transcript and no oath. The offer also restricts the range of questioning.

But it gets better. Those RNC-issued email accounts belonging to White House staff are also to be covered under the deal. And Fieldings says "it was and remains our intention to collect e-mails and documents from those [RNC-controlled] accounts."

In other words, whatever emails Congress gets, they'll have to get through the White House -- and they won't get anything unless they get it as part of Fielding's "unified offer," his “carefully and thoughtfully considered package of accommodations.”

Democrats had asked if Fielding couldn't separately provide the White House's "external" communications, since he was offering them as part of the deal anyway.

But if they want those emails, they'll have to agree to the White House's terms for interviewing Rove and others. And they'll have to resign themselves to not receiving any "internal" White House communications, even if those communications occurred via RNC-issued email addresses. The executive privilege claim with regard to all internal White House correspondence is questionable, but it's even more questionable with regard to the RNC-issued email communications.

As House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) put it: “The White House position seems to be that executive privilege not only applies in the Oval Office, but to the R.N.C. as well. There is absolutely no basis in law or fact for such a claim.”

That's why Conyers is trying to get the emails straight from the RNC. In his letter to the RNC chairman yesterday, he demanded that the RNC provide the emails "directly" to Congress -- instead of giving them to the White House. Not providing the emails directly to Congress, Conyers wrote, would be "an unjustified delay" and "potentially... an obstruction of our investigation."

So it looks like things are about to get even nastier.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) had his own summary of Fielding's offer: "‘We are stonewalling.’"

With regard to those lost emails by White House officials using RNC-issued email accounts, there are a lot of unanswered questions.

And so Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) along with the panel’s Ranking Member, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), wrote to White House counsel Fred Fiedling today to try and get some answers.

Some of those questions that need answering:

...we would like to know what was done in the past and whether any private e-mail retention policies were in place. We would also like to know how and when the White House first learned of the problem with private e-mail account usage and when it first came to light that e-mails may have been lost.

You can read the letter here.

In a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales today, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, asked that the Justice Department retain all emails received or sent to a White House official's RNC-issued email address.

But he also provided more details about those emails on the RNC servers -- details derived from his staff's interview with the RNC's counsel Rob Kelner. According to Kelner, the RNC stopped deleting all of the White House staff's emails in response to "unspecified legal inquiries" (i.e. Pat Fitzgerald's investigation) in August of 2004. And there are some very tantalizing details concerning Karl Rove...

From the letter:

According to Mr. Kelner, the RNC had a policy, which the RNC called a "document retention" policy, that purged all e-mails from RNC e-mail accounts and the RNC server that were more than 30 days old. Mr. Kelner said that as a result of unspecified legal inquiries, a "hold" was placed on this e-mail destruction policy for the accounts of White House officials in August 2004. Mr. Kelner was uncertain whether the hold was consistently maintained from August 2004 to the present, but he asserted that for this period, the RNC does have alarge volume of White House e-mails. According to Mr. Kelner, the hold would not have prevented individual White House officials from deleting their e-mail from the RNC server after August 2004.

Mr. Kelner's briefing raised particular concems about Karl Rove, who according to press reports used his RNC accountfor 95%o of his communications. According to Mr. Kelner, although the hold started in August 2004, the RNC does not have any e-mails prior to 2005 for Mr. Rove. Mr. Kelner did not give any explanation for the e-mails missing from Mr. Rove's account, but he did acknowledge that one possible explanation is that Mr. Rove personally deleted his e-mails from the RNC server.

Mr. Kelner also explained that starting in 2005, the RNC began to treat Mr. Rove's emails in a special fashion. At some point in 2005, the RNC commenced an automatic archive policy for Mr. Rove, but not for any other White House officials. According to Mr. Kelner, this archive policy removed Mr. Rove's ability to personally delete his e-mails from the RNC server. Mr. Kelner did not provide many details about why this special policy was adopted for Mr. Rove. But he did indicate that one factor was the presence of investigative or discovery requests or other legal concerns. It was unclear from Mr. Kelner's briefing whether the special archiving policy for Mr. Rove was consistently in effect after 2005. [my emphasis]

From Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington:

In a startling new revelation, CREW has also learned through two confidential sources that the Executive Office of the President (EOP) has lost over five million emails generated between March 2003 and October 2005. The White House counsel’s office was advised of these problems in 2005 and CREW has been told that the White House was given a plan of action to recover these emails, but to date nothing has been done to rectify this significant loss of records.

To be clear: these are emails controlled by the White House -- not emails on RNC servers, like those other lost emails.

When I spoke to CREW's Naomi Seligman Steiner, she could only say that the missing emails were generated over a period of "hundreds of days within that two year period." Furthermore, it's not clear whose emails they are, or why those emails are missing as opposed to others. "We're dealing with people who are only willing to tell us so much," she said.

But apparently this issue came up in the course of Plame investigation. Among the exhibits attached to CREW's new report, Without A Trace: The Missing White House Emails and the Violations of the Presidential Records, is a January 31, 2006 letter from Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to Scooter Libby's lawyer about pre-trial discovery.

One of the final paragraphs of the seven-page letter reads:

We are aware of no evidence pertinent to the charges against defendant Libby which has been destroyed. In an abundance of caution, we advise you that we have learned that not all email of the Office of Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system.

I'm sure we'll hear more about this.

Highlights from this morning's White House press gaggle, during which spokesman Scott Stanzel did his best to explain the White House's email retention policies to a very skeptical press corps.

Here's one highlight in particular. Until 2004, the RNC automatically deleted the emails of White House staff after 30 days. But after that, the policy was changed. The RNC wouldn't delete the email, but the staffers' themselves could. But to do that, they would not only need to delete the email but then delete it again from the trash folder (there's a larger question of whether even that would actually delete the email, but we'll get to that later). A reporter asked if that didn't mean that certain staffers had made two affirmative decisions to delete certain emails. Stanzel responded:

Since 2004, the RNC has had a policy of excluding White House staff from their automatic deletion policy, which means that the RNC every 30 days has automatic deletion policy. Since 2004, it's our understanding, that White House staff who have political email accounts provided by the RNC have been excluded from that policy. And in terms of the double delete, what you're talking about is the user's ability, if they are sitting at their laptop, and decide that, 'gosh, I've got a hundred emails here that I just -- are cluttering up my inbox, I want to put them in the deleted file, and I right-click the deleted items to empty my deleted file.' It's possible, possible, that those records could have been lost....

More below.

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It's been a busy day at the Senate Judiciary Committee:

A U.S. congressional panel investigating the firing of federal prosecutors authorized subpoenas on Thursday for e-mails the White House has declared may be missing.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., challenged the White House assertion, saying, "It's not a question of e-mails being lost, it's e-mails they don't want to retrieve."

The White House disclosed on Wednesday some of its staffers, including President George W. Bush's senior political adviser, Karl Rove, and several of his deputies, wrote e-mail messages on official business on Republican Party accounts, and some may have been wrongly deleted.

On a voice vote, the Judiciary Committee authorized subpoenas for these and other White House documents as well as for records it has sought from the Justice Department.

The panel also authorized subpoenas for Associate Deputy Attorney General William Moschella, and Scott Jennings, an aide to Rove, permitting Leahy to sign subpoenas compelling the Bush administration to surrender hundreds of new documents and force Moschella and Jennings to reveal their roles in the firings.

The votes authorize subpoenas to be issued if the administration records are not turned over and if Moschella and Jennings decline to appear before the panel.

Update: Here's the rundown, from a press release from the committee:

The authorization approved Thursday covers all documents in the possession, control or custody of the Department of Justice and the White House related to the committee’s ongoing investigation. Another authorization for subpoenas was approved by the committee for J. Scott Jennings, Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of Political Affairs; and William E. Moschella, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General.

The Committee is expected to vote on a similar authorization next week for Sara M. Taylor, Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Political Affairs.

Update: Here's video of Leahy this morning expressing his, ahem, skepticism about the White House's story on the emails.

Yesterday, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel spent about 80 minutes yesterday trying to explain to reporters how it was that the White House had "mishandled" Karl Rove's and dozens of other staffers' emails.

Despite all that explaining, the situation is crystal clear. 22 White House staffers also have an RNC-issued email account. Dating back to 2001, it's been about 50 staffers total. Through 2004, the RNC simply deleted all of those emails after 30 days -- that policy changed then, though that didn't stop the erasing. The staffers themselves could clean out their accounts. The White House only recently began preventing that.

Stanzel blamed the oversight on insufficient guidance. The rationale for the parallel email system, remember, is that it is a violation of the Hatch Act to use government resources for political purposes. The Clinton White House also had a similar parallel system. But since the distinction between politics and official duties is blurred beyond distinction in the Bush White House, many staffers have understandably erred on the side of politics. As Stanzel puts it:

"I can say that historically the White House didn't give enough guidance to staff on how to avoid violating the Hatch Act while following the Records Act. We didn't do a good enough job."

But it's apparent from emails that the White House avoided the governmental email system because it was vulnerable to investigators. The Hatch Act just provided a good excuse. In 2003, for instance, a lobbyist for Jack Abramoff Kevin Ring wrote him that emails about Abramoff's clients shouldn't be sent to White House addresses because "it might actually limit what they can do to help us, especially since there could be lawsuits, etc." That warning, Ring told The Washington Post, came from Jennifer Farley, a deputy in the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. Susan Ralston, Rove's personal aide, used RNC provided email accounts when corresponding with Abramoff, her old boss.

And remember that Karl Rove reportedly uses his RNC-provided account for approximately 95% of his communication.

In other words, it was an open secret at the White House that the parallel system was to be used for everything you didn't want coming out later -- an understanding that was most likely never made explicit, but a situation that was carefully preserved by not providing apparently any parameters for what sort of communication should be done via the White House system.