Woah Wait a Minute. What's That Buried in the P-I?

The headline: "White House E-Mail Inquiry Will Widen." The story: how the Bush administration has quite possibly made a major infraction, broken big giant rules, or in the P-I's words, "committed 'extensive' [legal] violations."

Remember that whole Alberto Gonzalez thing? Where it was speculated that the Attorney General deliberately fired a bevy of federal attorneys for political reasons, to appease a certain political agenda? There was a moment during all that hoo-ah when someone mentioned how Karl Rove and others may have discussed it over e-mail using their Republican National Committee e-mail addresses.

Stupid, we thought. What dimwit would discuss such a thing on e-mail when it's so obviously wrong, when there will so obviously be an electronic trail tying all this stupidness back to you? But no, apparently that's exactly what happened. There was a moment when they were saying, Whoops, those e-mails have been deleted. Obviously they hadn't considered that computer forensics is real, y'all. But the story kind of went away. Congress (both sides of the aisle) were pissed and had no confidence in Gonzalez, but then they turned around and voted on it and the damn no-confidence vote was squashed by the puppets in Bush's back pocket. Bush said ain't no one gonna tell him who to have in his government.

Any of this ringing a bell?

Yeah, well today, we're scanning down the P-I's website and saw this story buried toward the bottom. A friend with another paper told us the story broke yesterday, but you could've fooled us, as it's nowhere near that vast white space above the fold where it belongs, in our opinion.

We just thought you should know, that you may like to discuss. Per the P-I:

The RNC has preserved e-mails from some of the heaviest users, including 140,216 messages sent or received by Bush's top political adviser in the White House, Karl Rove.

However, "the RNC has preserved no e-mails for 51 officials," said the interim report, issued by committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif.

The 51 include Ken Mehlman, a former White House political director who reportedly used his RNC account frequently, the report said.

"Given the heavy reliance by White House officials on RNC e-mail accounts, the high rank of the White House officials involved, and the large quantity of missing e-mails," the report said, "the potential violation of the Presidential Records Act may be extensive."