On Thursday, Mother Jones broke the story that congressional Democrats had sent a private letter to the Obama administration asking key questions about what the president is doing to recover millions of White House emails that went missing during the Bush administration. The Democrats sent their letter a little over a week after the committee’s ranking Republican, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), wrote the administration asking about email issues, but the Dems did not make their letter public until today. What we had heard at the time, but could not confirm, was that one of the reasons the Democrats on the House oversight committee might have wanted to keep their letter private was that they had in fact copied-and-pasted their questions from Issa’s letter. It turns out that the copy-and-paste story is true: Mother Jones has finally obtained a copy of the Democrats’ letter (PDF of both letters). Two of the Democrats’ four questions are word-for-word reproductions of questions Issa asked in the letter he sent to Gregory Craig, the White House counsel, a little over a week before. The other two questions in the Democrats’ letter are very similar to ones in Issa’s letter.
Republican staff members told the Washington Times on Saturday that they had asked the majority Democrats to sign onto Issa’s letter. Jenny Rosenberg, a spokeswoman for committee Democrats, told the Times that emails from the Republicans asking the Democrats to sign on were “overlooked.” But Frederick Hill, a spokesman for Issa, claimed that the Dems were “clearly embarrassed… that they sent essentially the same letter to the White House that congressman Issa had already asked congressman Towns to sign on with him jointly.”
Whatever the truth of the matter, Rosenberg promised the Times that the Dems will put their letter online today. They just did, but there’s no explanation of why it took so long. The date on the Dems’ letter is February 27.
