FIGURE A


Karl Rove has had the ROVE.COM domain name since 1995. Roll over picture for a larger image.

He's had that domain since 1995, about halfway through George W. Bush's first term as Governor of Texas. This gets somewhat interesting because of the following testimony by Ms. Ralston:

Well, it was -- it wasn't -- I don't know how you would classify it, but it was a "Rove.com" email address. There were, I can't remember when, but at some point his Rove.com emails all went to the same political account. So if you sent an account, if you sent an email to George W. Bush.com or if you sent an email to him at Rove.com, it went to the same place.

Our analysis shows that ROVE.COM's MX records actually point to PrismNet.com's own mail server, a Sendmail server, as shown in Figure B.

FIGURE B


It doesn't look like ROVE.COM email is being forwarded anywhere. Roll over picture for a larger image.

While we can't tell for sure whether email to ROVE.COM routes indirectly to GWB43.COM, if it does, it's not set up at the DNS level. So, at least in this, Ms. Ralston's testimony may be mistaken.

Question: If Ms. Ralston is mistaken about Mr. Rove's ROVE.COM account, could she also be mistaken about other aspects of her testimony?

Conclusions
What have we learned from all this? Our biggest concern is, once again, national security. We don't know how many of Mr. Rove's BlackBerry handhelds are floating around out there, but losing even one could be dangerous.

The Committee's results reinforced what we already knew: archiving for RNC-based email records is quite inconsistent. We also know that the White House's plan for future archiving is also inconsistent, yet another thing overlooked by the Oversight Committee.

Before this report was issued, along with Ms. Ralston's testimony, we thought we'd discovered all of the problem areas related to email in the White House. We're quite disturbed to see there's yet another big problem area: losing BlackBerry handhelds.

Question: Is Mr. Rove the only one who misplaces these things?

Question: Are other key White House staffers losing their communications devices?

Question: Just how many times is someone allowed to lose a BlackBerry before being told, "No more"?

Steve Niles is Senior Editor for ZATZ Publishing. He is also an independent filmmaker and freelance writer. For more information, visit http://www.sn-films.com.