WASHINGTON • President Bush’s aides are lying about White House e-mails sent on a Republican account that might have been lost, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy suggested yesterday, vowing to subpoena those documents if the administration fails to cough them up.
“They say they have not been preserved. I don’t believe that!” Leahy shouted from the Senate floor.
“You can’t erase e-mails, not today. They’ve gone through too many servers,” said Leahy. “Those e-mails are there, they just don’t want to produce them. We’ll subpoena them if necessary.”
White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said there is no effort to keep the e-mails under wraps, and that the counsel’s office is doing everything it can to find any that were lost.
“The purpose of our review is to make every reasonable effort to recover potentially lost e-mails, and that is why we’ve been in contact with forensic experts,” he said.
“I’ve got a teenage kid in my neighbourhood that can go get ‘em for them,” he told reporters later.
The exchange was one of several developments on the US attorney issue, five days before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is to testify before Leahy’s committee as he tries to save his job.
In an effort to stave off charges that Democrats were setting perjury traps for witnesses on the issue, Sen Charles Schumer released 10 questions the panel would be asking Gonzales.
“’I don’t know’ will not be an adequate response to any question by the committee,” said Schumer, who is leading the investigation. Gonzales, who in the past has issued conflicting accounts of his role in the firings, has disappeared from public view in recent days.
Senate Democrats continued to toughen their stance against the administration, which has cast the firings as legitimate, if botched in their execution.
After his speech, Leahy’s committee approved — but did not issue — new subpoenas to compel the administration to produce documents and testimony about the firings.
Democrats say the firings might have been improper, but that probe yielded a weightier question: Whether White House officials such as political adviser Karl Rove are intentionally conducting sensitive official presidential business via non-governmental accounts to evade a law requiring preservation — and eventual disclosure — of presidential records.
