White House-RNC Email Backed Up in Chattanooga?

Evidence of Bush-Rove Crimes Hidden Away in Southern Town?

by Glynn Wilson

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — Hidden away in the basement of a bank building on Broad Street here, there is a bank of computer servers containing all the evidence Congress and the courts need to investigate and prosecute all the crimes of the Bush years. That includes the mysteriously missing e-mail messages sent by Karl Rove from his White House office through the Republican National Committee e-mail addresses from his special Blackberry reserved for political activities.

Ethics rules prohibit political campaigning from the White House, but since that was Rove’s sole job as political adviser to President Bush, what was an operative to do if he wanted to insist that a U.S. attorney be fired for not towing the Bush administration line by prosecuting Democrats? Rove, who has now defied a Congressional subpoena three times — a criminal act unprecedented in American history — is known to have used that Blackberry paid for by the RNC to keep on top of all kinds of nefarious activities, including the political prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman.

Jeff Averbeck, the majority owner of Smartech and Airnet, has denied backing up Rove’s e-mail that passed through his company’s servers, but no news organization, grand jury, special prosecutor or Congressional investigator has asked the right followup questions to get to the bottom of one of the most critical mysteries of the Bush years.

The Chattanooga Times Free Press managed to get a local interview with Averbeck in 2007 about the allegedly missing 5,000 e-mail messages, but what he said makes no technological sense.

He told the paper’s reporter that Smartech “does not have access to RNC e-mail records and simply routes the e-mails through its servers.” But anyone who has ever built Web sites and hosted Web sites with e-mail addresses attached to domain names knows that all e-mail messages are digitally backed up. Always. Otherwise, what would happen when the servers inevitably go down in the event of a power failure or other computer glitch?

Even CNN fell for the ruse of the missing e-mail, also reporting in April 2007 that “millions of White House e-mails may be missing,” although the source of that leak is never made clear. The entire story appears to have been a trial balloon to set up a fake cover story for the massive destruction of critical evidence, but we are not buying it.

The electronic evidence could not have simply disappeared. Even if someone tried to wipe the hard drives, there are back ups in other locations. Somebody knows where this e-mail evidence is hidden, but no one seems to be actively going after it, except for Velvet Revolution, which is in the process of preparing a new subpoena for Averbeck in a civil lawsuit filed over election theft in Ohio.

Determined to get to the bottom of this story by first getting into the compound in Chattanooga that is still GOP Web central, the corporate offices of the company that handled all the Web and Internet work for the Republican National Convention in 2007 and George W. Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004 as well as the e-mail traffic, I teamed up with videographer John Lee of PirateNews.org and headed over to 801 Broad Street.

When we got to the suite on the second floor that is listed as the company’s address on its Web site, we were greeted by a bank worker who said the company once occupied that space. Now you have to go into the building’s basement to find a high-tech doorway complete with security scanner. When you ring the buzzer, it takes a few minutes for someone to answer the door. We expected to be turned away, but amazingly we were allowed inside the compound.

We were led down two long hallways in the basement to a secret elevator deep inside the building, which took us up to the fifth floor. We were led down another long hallway lined with Republican law offices and finally into the offices of Smartech-Airnet. We got there just in time to witness a conference in progress by most of the high-powered Information Technology (IT) specialists in town, a group called the Chattanooga Technology Council.

We were greeted by a young man who identified himself only as Chris, who said he had only been with the company for a couple of weeks.

When we asked him if he could confirm our information from other sources that the company had backup copies of the e-mail, he said: “I cannot make any comments on that at all. I would live in fear of saying the wrong thing.”

Maybe there is a good reason for him to be careful with what he says. One of the top technology gurus tied to the Bush family, Mike Connell, died in a mysterious plane crash back during the Christmas holidays of 2008.

Here’s the 10 minute YouTube version of the video.