The use of outside Republican National Committee (RNC) and Bush-Cheney '04 re-election committee e-mail accounts by at least 88 White House staff members in the George Bush Administration was done in a manner that "circumvented" the requirements of federal laws mandating the historical preservation of presidential records.

That's one of the conclusions of a three-month-long U.S. House of Representatives inquiry into the White House use of outside e-mail systems dating back to 2001.

In a 16-page interim report released yesterday by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, investigators said there appears to have been widespread use of such e-mail accounts without proper preservation of the contents of all messages that were sent back and forth. According to the report, the investigation found that at least 88 White House officials used RNC e-mail accounts, which is higher than earlier White House estimates that no more than about 50 staff members had such accounts. The officials with RNC e-mail accounts include Bush senior adviser Karl Rove; Andrew Card, the former White House chief of staff; and Ken Mehlman, the former White House director of political affairs. Other users include officials in the Office of Political Affairs, the Office of Communications, and the Office of the Vice President, according to the report.

Rove and other officials used their RNC e-mail accounts heavily, according to the inquiry. For example, some 140,216 e-mails were sent or received by Rove and ultimately preserved by RNC IT systems, according to the report. More than half of those e-mails -- 75,374 -- were sent to or received from individuals using official ".gov" e-mail accounts, indicating they were for official business, according to the committee.

The problem with the use of the outside e-mail accounts, the report concludes, is that none of the RNC system e-mails for 51 of the 88 officials who used the system were preserved at all, leaving a gap in the presidential records that by law are supposed to be preserved.

For at least 37 White House officials for whom the RNC did preserve e-mails, there are "major gaps" in the e-mail records, the report states.

White House records fall under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which was established to govern and manage the collection and use of many presidential records. By law, messages sent and received through White House e-mail accounts are stored, archived and preserved. The White House has said that the outside e-mail accounts were used for political communications that would not have been permissible under federal law using the official White House e-mail system.

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