Bad email address sends Karl Rove emails to reporter

Check that email address! There could be serious consequences if you don’t, judging from an incident reported Thursday. Because of a mistaken email address, over 500 of Karl Rove’s emails ended up in the hands of an investigative reporter.

Nearly seven years ago, some pranksters created a fake domain for President Bush. (GeorgeWBush.org). More recently President Bush’s party started using the .com version of the domain — GeorgeWBush.com. Karl Rove, the president’s Deputy Chief of Staff, is also his political advisor, and Rove wanted to use a different email address to separate his political correspondence from his official duties.

But investigative reporter Greg Palast tells a different story — and he says he’s got the emails to prove it. Apparently confusion among Rove and the people he communicated with led to over 500 sensitive emails being sent to the parody web site by mistake. The parody site decided to share the emails with Palast, who took them to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a law professor and Democratic political activist. (He’s also the son of the U.S. attorney general during the Kennedy administration.) After scrutinizing Rove’s emails, Kennedy says there’s evidence of aggressive political manuevers in the supposedly non-political Department of Justice — which he says constitutes a felony. Palast says he’s shared the controversial emails with the Democratic Congressman who’s chairing investigations into the firings of U.S. attorneys.

Just think. This could have major political repercussions, exacerbating an already tense confrontation between investigators in Congress and employees from the U.S. Justice Department.

And it’s all because someone used the wrong email address!

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