All Blog Posts from Political Hotsheet

It appears the Obama administration has been spamming some unsuspecting citizens about health care reform, but the White House is reportedly laying the blame for the unwanted e-mails on advocacy groups.

Fox News queried the White House about its e-mail delivery system after the network reportedly received hundreds of e-mails from people claiming they were sent unsolicited e-mails directly from the White House.

The complaints largely referred to a long e-mail sent last week from White House adviser David Axelrod that promoted the president's health care reform agenda and sought to dispel "myths" about health care reform. Axelrod urged recipients of his e-mail to pass it on to others, but complaints to Fox News reportedly referred specifically to e-mails sent directly from the White House.

In a statement given Sunday night, the White House reportedly said it will change its e-mail sign-up procedures and indicated third party advocacy groups may have signed up individuals for the e-mail distribution list without their permission.

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The State newspaper on Wednesday published excerpts of personal e-mails exchanged between South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and the woman in Argentina with whom he has been having an extramarital affair.

In one of the e-mails, Sanford calls their relationship a "hopelessly impossible situation of love."

Sanford tearfully admitted to the affair in a press conference Wednesday, after his unexplained absence caused a media firestorm. The governor led his staff to believe he was hiking the Appalachian Trail when, in fact, he was in Buenos Aires.

The woman with which Sanford has been having an affair, whom the State identified as "Maria," reportedly declined to be interviewed. The newspaper says it will publish the full e-mail exchange, which it claims it obtained in December, in its Thursday edition. It has removed the woman's personal information from the e-mails.

Sanford's office reportedly did not dispute the authenticity of the emails.

Sanford expresses romantic feelings for the woman in the e-mails, writing on July 10, 2008, "You have a particular grace and calm that I adore. You have a level of sophistication that so fitting with your beauty. I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificent gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curve of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of the night’s light."

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A White House office will not have to publicly release its records relating to the disappearance of millions of e-mails from the Bush administration, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, in a 3-0 decision, upheld a ruling from a federal judge last year that the White House's Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

In an attempt to learn how millions of White House e-mails were lost between 2001 and 2005, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a lawsuit in 2007 to try to compel the Office of Administration to comply with a FOIA request for documents relating to the e-mails.

The Office of Administration, which performs a variety of services for the Executive Office of the President, previously complied with FOIA requests but reversed course in 2007. Officials at the time said the office was not subject to the law, and the appeals court today agreed.

"Because nothing in the record indicates that [the Office of Administration] performs or is authorized to perform tasks other than operational and administrative support for the President and his staff, we conclude that OA lacks substantial independent authority and is therefore not an agency under FOIA," Judge Thomas Griffith's written opinion said.

CREW and other groups last week sent a letter to the Obama White House, asking it to once again accept FOIA requests for the Office of Administration.

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There was quite a hullabaloo a year ago when the White House disclosed that from the beginning of the Bush Administration until October 2003, it had been tossing out official e-mails like so much spam.

The story came to light as Rep. Harry Waxman D-Calif., who was then head of the House Oversight Committee, was holding hearings into a statement from then White House spokesman Tony Fratto that no e-mails were missing.

Fratto's comment was a shift from a previous declaration from the administration in 2007 that it was uncertain if any e-mails were missing. It was also a shift from what was said three years ago, when Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald reported that "we have learned that not all e-mail 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." Fitzgerald made the comments as the White House scrambled to explain how the identity of CIA agent Valierie Plame had been leaked.

Now, in the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of the missing e-mails, the White House has changed its position again – saying that it has "made great progress accounting for e-mails."

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