Lawyer: Rove didn't mean to delete e-mail

WASHINGTON - Karl Rove's lawyer on Friday dismissed the notion that President Bush's chief political adviser intentionally deleted his own e-mails from a Republican-sponsored computer system.

The attorney said Rove believed the communications were being preserved in accordance with the law.

The issue arose because the White House and Republican National Committee have said they may have lost e-mails from Rove and other administration officials. Democratically chaired congressional committees want those e-mails for their probe of the firings of eight federal prosecutors.

"His understanding starting very, very early in the administration was that those e-mails were being archived," Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, said.

The prosecutor probing the Valerie Plame spy case saw and copied all of Rove's e-mails from his various accounts after searching Rove's laptop, his home computer, and the handheld computer devices he used for both the White House and Republican National Committee, Luskin said.

The prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, subpoenaed the e-mails from the White House, the RNC and Bush's re-election campaign, he added.

"There's never been any suggestion that Fitzgerald had anything less than a complete record," Luskin said.

Any e-mails Rove deleted were the type of routine deletions people make to keep their inboxes orderly, Luskin said. He said Rove had no idea the e-mails were being deleted from the server, a central computer that managed the e-mail.

On Thursday, one Democratic committee chairman said his understanding was that the RNC believed Rove might have been deleting his e-mails and in 2005 took action to preserve them in accordance with the law and pending legal action.

Gonzales connection
The mystery of the missing e-mails is just one part of a furor over the firings of eight federal prosecutors that has threatened Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' job and thrown his Justice Department into turmoil.

NBC VIDEO Leahy says he'll subpoena White House emails April 12: Patrick Leahy, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, says he will subpoena White House emails related to the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. MSNBC

For now, Bush is standing by his longtime friend from Texas, who has spent weeks huddled in his fifth-floor conference room at the Justice Department preparing to tell his story to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

New documents released Friday by the Justice Department may shed additional light, but their release prompted Gonzales' one-time chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, to postpone a closed-door interview with congressional investigators.

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