ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROVE.

ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROVE. The Los Angeles Times provides some useful background for those trying to follow the White House e-mail story who need more narrative in their news than the excellent muckraking blogs can provide. This is how the scandal started:

The large e-mail inquiry originated from once-separate congressional probes into allegations of politicization of executive-branch functions by the Bush White House. The House and Senate judiciary committees uncovered the use of the RNC e-mail addresses by White House staffers as it investigated the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.Waxman's staff found the RNC addresses while reading e-mails during the investigation of convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Waxman has also investigated efforts by Rove's office to communicate Republican electoral priorities to political appointees at federal agencies. Some of the e-mails were sent by the White House over special electronic communications links established by the RNC to handle political matters. Using government computers for such e-mails could violate federal laws governing presidential records and could threaten White House claims of executive privilege to shield internal documents from congressional scrutiny.

So this is the outcome of two probes into White House corruption, one involving convicted lobbyists, the other involving the firing of prosecutors who didn't toe the White House line. It may also be related to a third investigation, Patrick Fitzgerald's probe into the cover-up of the leaked identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame. Patrick Leahy is right that the missing Karl Rove e-mails can't have been fully deleted:

He said on the Senate floor Thursday that a teenager could find the lost White House e-mails. "They say they have not been preserved. I don't believe that," Leahy told the Senate. "You can't erase e-mails -- not today. They've gone through too many servers."

Someone needs to call a forensic technologist and recover them.--Garance Franke-Ruta