Emails are forever

One curious aspect of the whole Gonzales-Attorney purge scandal has been somewhat overlooked and that is the use of outside email addresses to conduct official government business. This circumvents mandatory archiving requirements under the Presidential Records Act. Shakes and Steve Benen are already all over this with excellent posts, so I'm not going to weigh in on this at the moment, but would urge to read them in full. However, here's a couple of grafs to tempt you into clicking over.

As Steve notes,

When a White House staffer sends an email, it’s automatically archived. Did some members of the Bush gang deliberately seek to avoid accountability by sending politically sensitive correspondence through alternate email addresses? If so, that’s legally problematic — staffers aren’t supposed to work around the law so as to avoid scrutiny. For that matter, it would also suggest the Bush gang knew they were doing something wrong — if this were “ordinary and routine,” as Rove argued the other day, then staffers wouldn’t have thought twice about using their official email addresses.

And Shakes reaches into the archives to remind us that Bush doesn't ever use email to specifically avoid the accountability problem and delivers this priceless quote from Papa Bush.

H.W. BUSH: You worry about it. People are going to subpoena the email records and we are going to, you know, you’ve gotta prove that you were telling the truth and all this stuff. I mean, it’s gotten so adversarial that it’s ugly.

Indeed. Having to prove you're not a liar is just so time consuming and it really interferes with the convenience of "truthiness."