Poor Scott Stanzel. He probably wasn’t ready for the big leagues yet. Wonder whose idea it was that he (and not Dana Perino) should handle the White House emails flap?
As we said yesterday, prior to 2004 the RNC would purge all emails in RNC-supplied email accounts after 30 days, including the accounts provided to White House officials for purposes of skullduggery, or the purveying of porn, or whatever. After 2004, the RNC stopped purging White House accounts, but White House officials could delete emails themselves, if they so chose. (Although White House policy clearly states that it is illegal to delete emails from RNC-supplied email accounts that relate to official White House duties.)
To delete an incoming email, Scott Stanzel explained at yesterday’s morning press gaggle, a White House official would have to delete the email twice—once from her inbox, and again from her trash folder. A reporter asked if that meant that staffers made two affirmative decisions in order to delete an email. The official Scott Stanzel response:
Since 2004, the RNC has had a policy of excluding White House staff from their automatic deletion policy, which means that the RNC every 30 days has automatic deletion policy. Since 2004, it’s our understanding, that White House staff who have political email accounts provided by the RNC have been excluded from that policy. And in terms of the double delete, what you’re talking about is the user’s ability, if they are sitting at their laptop, and decide that, ‘gosh, I’ve got a hundred emails here that I just — are cluttering up my inbox, I want to put them in the deleted file, and I right-click the deleted items to empty my deleted file.’ It’s possible, possible, that those records could have been lost….
No one will ever be able to accuse Scott Stanzel of furnishing sound bites to White House critics, that’s for sure.
(It’s funny, but once again the transcript of yesterday’s morning press gaggle is missing from the White House website. The funny part is that this seems to happen only when something embarrassing went down at the gaggle that I want to point to.)