Republicans suddenly find that White House email records preservation is an important issue:

A California Republican congressman has called on President Obama to put in place a system that ensures all White House emails be preserved even if official business was done through private e- mail accounts. …

“As you know, any e-mail sent or received by White House officials may be subject to retention under the Presidential Records Act (PRA),” [Darrell] Issa wrote [White House Counsel Greg] Craig in the letter.

“The use of personal e-mail accounts, such as Gmail to conduct official business raises the prospect that presidential records will not be captured by the White House e-mail archiving system. Consequently Gmail users on the President’s staff run the risk of incorrectly classifying their e-mails as non-records under the [Presidential Records] Act.” …

Issa also asked that the White House respond to a series of questions about the administration’s email archiving by March 4.

I fully agree with Steve Benen’s take: this is utter hypocrisy. For years we have seen the Bush White House make a complete and utter mockery of the Presidential Records Act, brazenly destroying email records (oh, I’m sorry, it was accidental–they accidentally erased years of email messages, then accidentally erased the backups, and then accidentally destroyed the hard drives they had been stored on–all accidentally and coincidentally) and having strongly utilized communication lines outside official email accounts, whose records were also destroyed. And all during that time, not a peep from Republicans about how it was inappropriate or how to fix it.

And now, when some White House staffers use GMail accounts because their official accounts are not yet active or when the White House servers are down, suddenly Republicans are coming in with microscopes and legal challenges. Benen points out that when Democrat Henry Waxman brought up Bush email abuses, Issa dismissed the charges as software glitches and accused Democrats of going on a fishing expedition for partisan purposes.

Pure, utter hypocrisy.

The thing is, this is just one example of a standard Republican pattern of behavior: abuse the crap out of something, and then suddenly become zealots for reform when Democrats take power. During the Bush years, Republicans went hog wild with spending and pork; after Democrats take control, they suddenly become fiscal hawks complaining about deficits and spending reform. During the Bush years, they often squawked about how the opposition should never criticize the president when soldiers are in battle somewhere in the world, but they have no trouble launching searing attacks against Obama, even where his military policies are concerned–something they used to claim was bordering on treasonous, giving aid and comfort to the terrorists and other enemies.

The reverse is also true: Republicans whine endlessly when Democrats use minority-party techniques, like the filibuster. You know all about how they went insane with rage and indignation that Democrats dared to even think about using the filibuster when Bush tried to ram through his extremist judges multiple times–but the second they became the minority party, it was filibuster, filibuster, filibuster.

So the recent focus on White House emails is not in the least surprising, when you think about it.

Late note: This is not to say, of course, that the Obama administration should be exempt from overview on matters such as this, nor that they should be excused from meticulous record-keeping as tit-for-tat after the Bush administration’s horrendous abuses. Instead, it is to say that Republicans have absolutely no credibility whatsoever to be throw about accusations or insinuations on the matter–least of all Issa.