Rove policies cross legal, ethical lines

CONGRESSIONAL oversight hearings have revealed that White House senior political adviser Karl Rove and White House staffers working for him make liberal use of political e-mail accounts maintained by the Republican National Committee and the Bush/Cheney '04 campaign. This is in addition to their official White House e-mail accounts.

If Rove & Co. are spending a majority of their time engaging in political activities, they have no business being on the public payroll. Their salaries, like political consultants working for previous presidents, should be paid by the national party organization or the president's campaign committee.

But if they're using political e-mail accounts to do official government business instead of their official White House e-mail accounts, then they're in violation of the Presidential Records Act.

The situation reveals, once again, how the Bush administration has blurred the line between official government business and political campaign activity to the point that the two have become indistinguishable.

Ed Rollins, who was political affairs director during the Reagan administration, told Alexis Simendinger of the National Journal that he was appalled at how far the Bush administration had gone in tearing down firewalls that in the past kept political operatives from having direct contact with executive agencies.

The House Oversight Committee has found that most political account e-mails sent or received by Rove and other White House staffers have disappeared. But of those that have been preserved, they show that Rove sent more than 100 per day and received more than 200 per day, more than half involving government agencies.

The dual roles of Rove & Co. have given us the worst of both worlds - political operatives engaging in campaign activities on government time and high-level, government-paid staffers hiding behind political e-mail accounts to evade scrutiny of how their political aims factored in government agencies' work.

And what do Rove and the Bush White House have to show for it in either policy accomplishments or electoral gains? Precious little. But they do leave behind a legacy of undermining the integrity of government.

Sacramento Bee