Posted by The Crux |
Last month, based on an executive-privilege claim, President Bush ordered White House officials and ex-officials to not comply with subpoenas from congressional committees investigating the fired U.S. attorney scandal (Washington Post and BN-Politics). In other words, neither Congress nor the American people have a right to know what the Bush Adminsitration has been doing -- despite our constitutionally established system of checks and balances -- simply because President Bush says so.
A few days ago, the Republican National Committee joined the growing list of people who are flipping Congress the bird. Truthout's Jason Leopold reported:
"The Republican National Committee said it will not abide by a subpoena and turn over documents to a Congressional committee investigating the firings of at least eight US attorneys last year because the RNC is waiting to see if the White House will assert executive privilege over RNC documents at the center of the controversy, according to an outside law firm retained by the RNC....
"In some instances, the US attorneys said they were pressured by Republican lawmakers and RNC operatives to file criminal charges against Democrats at the center of public corruption probes prior to last year's midterm election as well as individual cases of voter fraud, which the attorneys said was based on weak evidence, in order to cast a dark cloud over Democratic incumbents and swing election results toward Republican challengers."
That sounds like a plan that Karl Rove might have cooked up. The oft-credited "they" don't call Rove "boy genius" or "Bush's brain" for nothing.
The Judiciary Committee wants the RNC emails partly because evidence suggests that numerous White House officials had used RNC email addresses to discuss Whte-House-related business. Congress is also questioning whether officials' use of RNC email accounts violated federal law (McClatchy).
The RNC's lawyer wrote the following (in part) to House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, who signed off on those subpoenas that the RNC seems to want to ignore:
"As we have repeatedly emphasized, once the dispute between the white House and the Committee is resolved -- either through an agreement or through a final court order -- the RNC is fully prepared to comply with the terms of the resolution." (See letter).
That could take a lonnng time. I hope the servers on which the subpoenead emails are stored don't crash in the mean time.
Giant Donut Worldwide wondered: "Since when has the Republican National Committee become a part of the Executive branch? Did I miss something in the constitution?"
Yes, the RNC's lawyer believes executive privilege extends to non-executive-branch employees -- and he cited case law, but I'm not a judge: I don't know whether its on point or not. I guess we'll see in time.
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