US Democrats Accuse Rove of Shady Emailing

The US justice department will today release further documents on the sacking of eight US attorneys as the White House faces a storm of criticism over missing emails.

But the release of new documents is unlikely to ease the pressure on the Bush administration over a row that has already led to high-level resignations in the justice department and threatens the position of the attorney general, Alberto Gonzales.

In the latest twist to a high-voltage confrontation between congressional Democrats and the White House, the administration yesterday admitted that missing emails sent on Republican Party accounts may include some connected to the firings.

Democrats have accused Karl Rove, a top adviser to the president George Bush, and other senior aides of using the email accounts maintained by the Republican national committee to circumvent government disclosure requirements.

Following a meeting between Republican party lawyers and congressional investigators, Henry Waxman, a fierce Democratic critic of the White House, said he learned that Mr Rove might have deliberately deleted them himself - an accusation rejected by Republican party officials.

Mr Rove and 21 other White House officials maintained separate email accounts for government business and work on political campaigns. Democrats suspect they used these political accounts for official work to avoid leaving a paper trail.

The White House admission that some of those emails have gone missing has fuelled Democratic suspicions.

"We're learning that off-book communications are being used by these people in the White House by using Republican political email addresses, and they say they have not been preserved," Senator Patrick Leahy, the Democratic chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, said in an angry speech in the Senate yesterday. "I don't believe that. You can't erase emails, not today."

At the heart of the issue is whether the firings were politically motivated. Previous justice department documents given to Congress have contradicted initial White House assertions that Mr Rove and Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel, were not involved. The documents indicated their involvement in planning the dismissals.

The documents also revealed that a deputy to Mr Rove, Scott Jennings, who works in the White House office of political affairs, had used his Republican national committee email account, ending in gwb43.com, to communicate about the dismissals with a top aide to Mr Gonzales.

Democrats have suggested that some of the firings were connected with political corruption and voter fraud investigations. One of the sacked prosecutors, Carol Lam, had successfully prosecuted a Republican congressman from California, Randy Duke Cunningham, for corruption. Cunningham was sentenced to eight years in prison last year.

Bush administration officials said some of those fired had performance problems and pointed out that presidents have wide latitude to hire and fire US attorneys.

Mr Gonzales is to testify before Mr Leahy's committee on Tuesday in what is widely seen as a last chance to hang on to his job.