Andrew C. McCarthy – The Rice email outlines Obama’s strategy to withhold key details of the Russia investigation. On her way out the White House door and out of her job as national-security adviser, Susan Rice writes an email-to-self. Except it’s not really an email-to-self. It is quite consciously an email for the record.

Her term having ended 15 minutes before, Rice was technically back in private life, where private people have private email accounts — even notepads if they want to scratch out a reminder the old-fashioned way. Yet, for at least a few more minutes, Rice still had access to her government email account. She could still generate an official record. That’s what she wanted her brief email to be: the dispositive memorialization of a meeting she was worried about — a meeting that had happened over two weeks earlier, at which, of course, President Obama insisted that everything be done “by the book.”

Funny, though: The “by the book” thing about contemporaneous memos is that they are, well, contemporaneous — made at or immediately after the event they undertake to memorialize. They’re written while things are as fresh as they will ever be in one’s mind, before subsequent events motivate the writer to spin a decision, rather than faithfully record it. Continue reading →