Gazette noted new state GOP director but omitted his role in White House emails probe

Summary: Reporting March 13 on "[f]ormer Mitt Romney campaign organizer Mike Britt" assuming the role of Colorado Republican Party executive director, The Gazette of Colorado Springs left out key information about Britt's prior work in the Bush administration. He is one of the former White House staffers identified in a congressional investigation related to the use of Republican Party email accounts for official government business.

In a March 13 article about Colorado Republican Party chairman Dick Wadhams formally assuming the role of manager of U.S. Senate candidate Bob Schaffer's campaign, The Gazette of Colorado Springs reported that "[f]ormer Mitt Romney campaign organizer Mike Britt" will take over as the party's executive director. But the article (accessed via the newspaper's electronic edition) did not mention that Britt is a former White House staffer scrutinized in a congressional investigation seeking to uncover "whether White House officials violated the Presidential Records Act by using e-mail accounts maintained by the Republican National Committee [RNC] and the Bush Cheney '04 campaign for official White House communications."

From the March 13 article in The Gazette of Colorado Springs, "State GOP director is leaving post":

DENVER -- Dick Wadhams announced Tuesday that he will leave his post as executive director of the Colorado Republican Party to manage former Congressman Bob Schaffer's race for the state's open U.S. Senate seat.

[...]

Former Mitt Romney campaign organizer Mike Britt will take over Wadhams' director job, though Wadhams will maintain his role as elected party chairman.

As Colorado Media Matters has noted, Mike Saccone of The Daily Sentinel of Grand Junction stated in a March 11 posting on his "Political Notebook" blog that "Britt's rise to the top of the Colorado Republican Party comes as he and a group of other White House staff members were targeted in 2007 as possibly violating the Presidential Records Act by using Republican National Committee and other unofficial e-mail addresses to conduct official White House business."

A June 2007 interim report by the majority staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform listed Britt among White House officials, including former White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, who "averaged more than 100 e-mails sent or received each weekday" that their RNC email accounts were active. Britt was associate director of the White House Office of Political Affairs. According to the interim report:

Mr. Rove and six other White House officials -- Mike Britt, Jonathan Felts, Korinne Kubenna, Mindy McLaughlin, Cliff Rosenberger, and Nick Sinatra -- all averaged more than 100 e-mails sent or received each weekday that their accounts were active.¹¹ In 2007, Mr. Rove frequently sent more than 100 e-mails per day through his RNC e-mail account and received more than 200 per day.

A chart included in the report indicated that among emails preserved by the RNC, Britt from February 2, 2007, through April 27, 2007, sent 3,589 emails and received 5,147 through his RNC account. Of those, 830 were sent to, and 1,218 received from "official '.gov' email accounts."

As Media Matters for America has noted, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in 2007 directed the RNC and the Bush-Cheney 2004 presidential campaign to preserve email messages to or from accounts held by White House officials, and has said that as a result of several of the committee's investigations, it "has reason to believe that many e-mails related to official government business may have been deleted from the RNC's servers." The committee's majority staff also said in its interim report that "[t]he evidence obtained by the Committee indicates that White House officials used their RNC e-mail accounts in a manner that circumvented" the requirements of the Presidential Records Act.

On February 26, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held a hearing on "Electronic Records Preservation at the White House." In his opening statement, committee Chairman Henry Waxman noted that "the RNC has informed our Committee that it has no intention of trying to restore the missing White House e-mails from backup tapes containing past RNC e-mail records."

—E.B.