HEADS UP: Conyers/Sánchez expand US Attorney investigation to RNC (E-MAILS!!!)

But he also provided more details about those emails on the RNC servers -- details derived from his staff's interview with the RNC's counsel Rob Kelner. According to Kelner, the RNC stopped deleting all of the White House staff's emails in response to "unspecified legal inquiries" (i.e. Pat Fitzgerald's investigation) in August of 2004. And there are some very tantalizing details concerning Karl Rove...

From the letter:

According to Mr. Kelner, the RNC had a policy, which the RNC called a "document retention" policy, that purged all e-mails from RNC e-mail accounts and the RNC server that were more than 30 days old. Mr. Kelner said that as a result of unspecified legal inquiries, a "hold" was placed on this e-mail destruction policy for the accounts of White House officials in August 2004. Mr. Kelner was uncertain whether the hold was consistently maintained from August 2004 to the present, but he asserted that for this period, the RNC does have alarge volume of White House e-mails. According to Mr. Kelner, the hold would not have prevented individual White House officials from deleting their e-mail from the RNC server after August 2004.

Mr. Kelner's briefing raised particular concems about Karl Rove, who according to press reports used his RNC accountfor 95%o of his communications. According to Mr. Kelner, although the hold started in August 2004, the RNC does not have any e-mails prior to 2005 for Mr. Rove. Mr. Kelner did not give any explanation for the e-mails missing from Mr. Rove's account, but he did acknowledge that one possible explanation is that Mr. Rove personally deleted his e-mails from the RNC server.