Dems Tread Lightly on Obama Oversight

Congressional Democrats are asking questions about the White House email system—they’re just doing it very quietly.

Photo by flickr user <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/auntiep/17135231/">auntiep</a> used under a <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org">Creative Commons</a> license.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


The Democrats on the House committee charged with oversight of the executive branch want to hold the Obama administration accountable—they just don’t want to do it in public.

According to White House and congressional aides, Democrats on the
House oversight committee have sent a letter to the administration
asking questions about the White House email system and the administration’s methods of
preserving electronic records. The Democrats’ letter echoes one sent on February 19
by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the ranking Republican on the
oversight committee, to White House counsel Gregory Craig. Issa asked about the status of a White House effort, which
began under the Bush administration, to install a new archiving system.
He also requested information on the “White House’s policy for ensuring
that all messages sent or received by White House staff on private,
non-governmental e-mail accounts are preserved according to law.”
Unlike Issa’s letter, which was announced in a press release and posted
on the Web, the Democrats opted to keep their request for information
private.

There was one other key difference. The Republicans asked the Obama White House to respond to their questions by March 4. The Democrats’ didn’t set a deadline, instead asking only for the administration’s “prompt attention.” This has generated suspicion on the Republican side of the committee. “Did the White House call and ask the majority to send a letter so they can respond to the majority’s and not ours?” asks Kurt Bardella, a spokesman for the committee’s Republicans. The White House has informed the committee’s minority staff that it plans to answer the Democrat’s deadline-less letter at some point, Bardella says.

The handling of White House emails became a controversy during the Bush administration, when it was revealed that millions of internal emails had gone missing due to a lackluster archiving system. Other emails were also lost because Karl Rove and other top White House officials used Republican party email accounts to conduct government business. All of this remains the subject of litigation by two nonprofit watchdog groups, which sued the Bush administration—and now the Obama administration—to ensure that presidential email records are properly preserved.

“Whether or not [committee chairman Ed Towns (D-NY)] is sending out a press release, he’s still not sitting back like the Republicans did when they were doing oversight of the Bush administration,” says Jenny Rosenberg, a spokeswoman for committee Democrats. “We have some concerns about the overhaul of the emails system in the White House, we’re asking them to clarify what’s going on, and we hope to learn more.”

Keeping the letter to Obama private represents a shift from the Democrats’ Bush-era oversight practices. From 2006 to 2008, the oversight committee, chaired then by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), was a constant thorn in the White House’s side. Waxman often sent the Bush administration letters requesting information about a host of issues—from Blackwater to the CIA leak scandal to Iraqi oil contracts—and made his demands and deadlines publicly known. “Mr. Waxman made a practice of calling out the administration very publicly, setting deadlines, and then holding the administration’s feet to the fire if they failed to meet that deadline,” Bardella says.

Under Towns—and with a Democrat in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—the oversight committee seems to be willing to give the White House more leeway. But it’s not just the Democrats who seem to be singing a new tune. The Republicans have also changed their approach. Issa, for his part, is a recent convert to the importance of preserving White House emails. In 2007, when Waxman held a hearing on the use of non-governmental email accounts by Bush administration officials, Issa asked whether the committee was “simply going on a fishing expedition at $40,000 to $50,000 a month.” Now, he’s demanding answers. Years earlier, when the Clinton administration had email issues in the 1990s, the Republicans, then controlling the committee, wrote that “the e-mail matter can fairly be called the most significant obstruction of congressional investigations in U.S. history.” At the time, the minority Democrats and Waxman shot back that “this Committee has a long history of making unsubstantiated allegations.”

“It sometimes surprises me that we are not able to consistently have across the board support for these transparency issues,” says Meredith Fuchs, the general counsel for the National Security
Archive, one of the groups suing the Obama administration over
email preservation. “The government is going to go back and forth from one party to another. The goal ought to be that we have accountability and transparency in every administration.”

The Obama administration, though, is showing signs that it may be looking to settle the emails case. While the White House says it does not comment on ongoing litigation, Fuchs confirms that the National Security Archive is in talks with the White House about resolving the case. “I am hopeful,” she says, “but there are a lot of unknown facts to sort out before we can get to a point where we can be confident that adequate measures were taken to restore the millions of e-mails lost by the Bush administration and that the Obama administration has a better system for preservation.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate