As I wrote in yesterday's column, Tuesday's document dump -- which initiated from the Justice Department, not the White House -- includes e-mails from J. Scott Jennings, Karl Rove's deputy at the White House, coming from an e-mail address at gwb43.com. That's a domain owned by the Republican National Committee.
This raises all sorts of questions. I put four of them to a White House spokesman yesterday, but haven't gotten a response.
The questions:
1) Does White House policy allow White House staffers to use non-White House e-mail addresses for official White House business? Does it prohibit it? What is the policy?
2) Would these e-mails be treated any differently from official White House e-mails when it comes to archiving or subpoena purposes?
3) Does it create either impropriety or the appearance of impropriety that gwb43.com is a domain owned by the Republican National Committee?
[...]
Ironically, this would appear to be the flipside of the issue that arose during the Clinton administration, when Vice President Al Gore improperly made fund-raising calls from his White House office. Here, rather than having party business being conducted using official resources, you have official business being conducted using party resources.
Perhaps some of my colleagues in the press can raise these questions at a White House briefing.
Here's the WHOIS data on gwb43.com, confirming its ownership by the RNC.
