As soon as the Bushies installed themselves in the White House in 2001, the Republican Party set up a second tier of electronic communications out of the political office run by Karl Rove.

On its surface, the new email domains were legal. In fact, their stated purpose was to avoid the criticism that they were doing GOP politics on the public dime — a charge Republicans had made against the Clinton White House without ever offering proof of it, of course.

According to the Presidential Records Act, a government “sunshine law,” all communication involving a member of the president’s staff are required to be preserved for scrutiny. If we learned nothing else over the six years when the GOP ran all three branches of government, conservatives view laws as only applying to “the little people” — meaning, of course, Democrats. It is only natural, therefore, that Rove and his network of operatives in the federal bureaucracy began using the alternative email servers to subvert the Act and conceal improper political operations inside the government.

Amid the thousands of documents dumped by the Dept. of Justice in response to congressional demands in the U.S. Attorney purge, investigators found emails to and fron Rove’s White House and DOJ political flunkies using the alternative email domains (including gwb43.com and rnchhq.com), apparently in an effort to circumvent the oversight and the sunshine law.

Rep. Henry Waxman, who chairs the House committee that investigates government operations, is demanding to see the GOP’s official emails sent to and from the White House related several investigatiosn – the prosecutor purge, the corrupt GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Rove’s use of the Government Services Administration (GSA) for political purposes:

White House staff arranging for the GSA briefing by a Rove deputy, Scott Jennings, used the gwb43.com e-mail domain name. That caught the attention of Waxman’s investigators, who had previously examined e-mails from Abramoff to Rove’s executive assistant, Susan B. Ralston, to object to an impending Interior Department decision. The decision, he wrote, was “anathema to all our supporters it’s important if possible to get some quiet message from the WH [White House] that this is absurd.”

Ralston used outside accounts — including at rnchq.org — to communicate with Abramoff and his partners. One e-mail from an Abramoff associate said that White House personnel had warned “it is better to not put this stuff in writing in [the White House] … e-mail system because it might actually limit what they can do to help us, especially since there could be lawsuits, etc.”

Abramoff’s response, according to a copy of his e-mail released by Waxman’s committee, was: “Dammit. It was sent to Susan on her rnc pager and was not supposed to go into the WH system.” Ralston later resigned in connection with the lobbying scandal…

In the U.S. attorney case, Rove deputy Jennings used the RNC e-mail system to write to D. Kyle Sampson, then Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales’ chief of staff, in August 2006 about replacing Arkansas U.S. Atty. H.E. “Bud” Cummins III with former Rove protege Tim Griffin.

“We’re a go for the U.S. atty plan. WH leg, political and communications have signed off and acknowledged that we have to be committed to following through once the pressure comes,” Jennings wrote in an e-mail from the gwb43.com domain name. Sampson noted in a related e-mail that “getting him appointed was important to” Rove, then-White House Counsel Harriet E. Miers and other officials.

While the White House may find it more difficult to claim executive privilege in preventing Congress from reviewing emails on the RNC system, Republicans aren’t too worried: the RNC purges emails from its servers after 30 days.