Rove Lawyer: E-Mail Deletion Unintentional

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 computer system.

The attorney said 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 issue arose because the White House and Republican National Committee have said they may have lost e-mails from Rove and other administration officials. Democrat-chaired congressional committees want those e-mails for their probe of the firings of eight federal prosecutors.

CBS News White House Correspondent Peter Maer says that Democrats are hinting at Watergate-like coverups, comparing the missing e-mails to the famous 18-minute gap in a Nixon White House tape.

Aides to President Bush improperly used Republican Party-sponsored e-mail accounts for official business, the administration acknowledges, and lost an undetermined number of e-mails in the process.

The "mistake," as the White House is calling it, was discovered inadvertently through Congress' ongoing probe of the administration's dismissal of the U.S. attorneys.

In the thousands of pages of documents the Justice Department has given to congressional investigators were e-mails disclosing that at least one White House official used his party-supplied, non-governmental e-mail account to help plan the firings.

New documents released Friday by the Justice Department may shed additional light, but their release prompted Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' one-time chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, to postpone a closed-door interview with congressional investigators.

One Justice Department spreadsheet on the qualifications of the sitting federal prosecutors shows that along with prosecution experience, political experience and judicial experience, the U.S. attorneys were judged on whether they were members of the conservative Federalist Society.

The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, founded by conservative law students, now claims 35,000 members, including prominent members of the Bush administration, the federal judiciary and Congress.

Among those prosecutors noted for being members: Rachel Paulose, the U.S. attorney in Minnesota whose office suffered a revolt this month when three lawyers resigned their management posts. Paulose earlier had served as a top Justice Department counsel and special assistant to Gonzales.

One of the eight prosecutors who were fired, Kevin Ryan of San Francisco, also was a member of the conservative group, according to the document.

The missing e-mails posed some of the weightiest questions of a sprawling political and legal conflict between the Bush administration and Democrats in Congress.

Democrats are questioning whether any White House officials purposely sent e-mails about official business on the RNC server — then deleted them, in violation of the law — to avoid scrutiny.

White House officials said the administration is making an aggressive effort to recover anything that was lost. "We have no indications that there was improper intent when using these RNC e-mails," spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

Luskin said Rove didn't know that deleting e-mails from his RNC in-box also deleted them from the RNC's server. That system was changed in 2005.

Such a configuration is uncommon and makes recovering e-mails "immeasurably harder," said retired FBI computer crimes specialist Joseph Dooley.

"It happens on occasion but usually you're not deleting things off the server," Dooley said. "That's highly unusual."

Rove voluntarily allowed investigators in the Valerie Plame case to review his laptop and copy the entire hard drive, from which investigators could have recovered even deleted e-mails, Luskin said.

As the investigation was winding down, Luskin said, prosecutors came to his office and reviewed all the documents — including e-mails — he had collected to be sure both sides had a complete set.

Luskin said if prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald believed any e-mails were destroyed, he would have called.

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

Fitzgerald's office declined comment.

A lawyer for the RNC told congressional investigators that the RNC may be able to recover some of those e-mails sent from August 2004 on. That's when the RNC put a hold on an automatic purge policy.

The RNC lawyer, Rob Kelner, also said that the Republican committee has none of Rove's e-mails on its server prior to 2005, possibly because Rove deleted them, according to House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif.

Maer reports that the White House confirmed that in 2005 the Republican National Committee cut off Rove's power to delete his e-mails from their account. A spokeswoman could not immediately say why that action was taken.

One reason for specifying Rove, Waxman said, appears to have been pending legal action against him.

Some 50 past and current White House aides had the RNC accounts, according to the administration, to conduct political business.

Separately, Perino said millions of White House e-mails could have been accidentally lost when staffers' accounts were converted over to Microsoft Outlook from Lotus Notes during the first couple of years of the administration.

"I wouldn't rule out that there were a potential 5 million e-mails lost," the spokeswoman said.