It was announced today that CREW is seeking Congressional oversight of the administration's adherence to the provisions of the Presidential Records Act (CREW press release) in the decision to fire the US Attorneys.
Discussion of the PRA may sound like distinctly inside baseball, but expect to hear more and more about this statute (US Code: Title 44, Chapter 22). The PRA will be important, not only in this scandal, but in every controversy in which this administration is embroiled. It will become more and more important the closer we draw to January 2009, when Bush leaves his office to his successor, because this statute governs the handover of WH records to the new administration.
CREW is asking Congress to look into the question, raised by the use of non-WH e-mail servers by the participants in the firings, of whether the admininstration is fulfilling its duty to preserve the full record of its actions required by the PRA. But the PRA also requires the administration, at the end of its term, to hand over this full record of its offical actions to a federal government now controlled by the new administration.
The full and complete handover that the PRA requires will be crucial to the subsequent legal fate of the bosses in this administration, and especially the capo di tutti capi. Consider just one scandal out of many, the Plame affair. The WH denied Fitzgerald access to the WH e-mail server, forcing him to submit a request for specific e-mails, and then denied him numerous items even from that list. Does anyone seriously doubt that the denied e-mails, and others whose existence Fitzgerald didn't even suspect, were denied precisely because they would have provided the evidence of intent that IIPA famously requires? But the next President will have the contents of Dubya's WH server at his disposal, free to throw it open to Fitgerald or whoever succeeds him. And so on and so forth for every scandal surrounding this administration. This administration is largely the sole custodian of the evidence of its own guilt in a myriad of crimes. Much of that evidence resides in WH records, whose maintenance and handover to the next administration is governed by the PRA.
Administration attempts to circumvent the PRA will themselves become a new source of controversy. There are two basic approaches the administration could take to keep information hidden despite the PRA. WH records pertaining to purely personal and political activities, as opposed to performance of official duties, do not have to be turned over. The Archivist of the United States gets to make the call on what the administration can dispose of under this heading, so expect that hitherto obscure office to assume new prominence. (Hmmm... Wonder if the renewed Patriot Act contains an obscure provision added at 3:00AM one dark and stormy night, allowing the President to name a new Archivist without Congressional approval?) The more direct approach to concealing evidence would simply be to destroy it, and attempt to destroy all traces that it ever existed, then cover tracks on anything having been destroyed. In this age of computers, the questions of how and whether this might be done, and how best prevented, would seem to be largely technical questions, for which I lack the expertise to say much further.
The PRA requires Dubya to hand over the WH records of his administration, without shredder parties and burn bag fests. I would think that the PRA might just be due right about now for an overhaul designed to stiffen the enforcement provisions against those shredder parties, and require implementation of whatever technical means are thought best to make the evidence impervious to disappearance without a trace. Oh, and let's make sure, well before January 2009, that the Archivist of the United States is a non-orc. Perhaps these measures would not get enough support, at least at first, to override a veto, but just creating a controversy, getting the public attention on this issue of just what great clouds of white smoke over the WH in January 2009 would mean, could prove very useful. Might be able to shame/scare enough Republican support to override a veto...