It started with a series of straightforward questions from Fox News correspondent Major Garrett to White House spokesman Robert Gibbs.  Garrett’s bottom-line inquiry: How did thousands of Americans, who had never contacted the White House previously, receive unsolicited political emails authored by top administration strategist David Axelrod?    In response, Gibbs and his press office colleagues undertook a strategy of dismissing the core issue, impugning the questioner, shifting blame, and vaguely pledging to change White House email policy.  Still, the basic question of exactly how the White House came to possess countless private email addresses remains unanswered.  The public deserves a thorough and precise explanation.

The latest development in this mini-tempest—playing out nearly exclusively on Fox and in the conservative blogosphere—is that the White House now admits it hired a Minnesota-based public communications firm (GovDelivery) to distribute an infamous Obamacare propaganda email, authored by Axelrod.  Fox reports:

The White House hired a private communications company based in Minnesota to distribute mass e-mails, helping to shed light on how some recipients received e-mails in support of President Obama's health care plan without signing up for them, FOX News has learned.

The company, Govdelivery, describes itself as the world's leading provider of government-to-citizen communication solutions and says its e-mail service provides a fully-automated on-demand public communication system.

It is still unknown how much taxpayer money the White House provides to Govdelivery for its services.

Again, it’s still a mystery just how the White House obtained the email addresses targeted by Axelrod's talking points e-blast in the first place, especially since many recipients insist they've never contacted the White House or the Obama campaign in any capacity.  

After arrogant dismissals of Major Garrett's questions wore thin, the administration began blaming "outside groups" for compiling the email lists in question.  In other words, they claim, people may have signed online petitions for independent advocacy groups, who then forwarded those petitions—email addresses included—to the White House.   At which point, supposedly, the White House's super-sophisticated mega-email system ingested all of the incoming addresses by default, adding them to a master email listserv.  I'm not an expert on mass emails, but that explanation strikes me as a tad fishy.

This account has also proven problematic because many of the original citizens who complained about receiving unsolicited political emails have subsequently stated that they did not sign any online petitions for any groups whatsoever.

So what happened here?  HotAir.com’s Allahpundit posted a portion of an email I sent earlier in the week, describing a series of phone calls I received on my radio program last Sunday:

I mentioned this controversy on my show last week & got lots of calls from people who never signed up for WH emails (and never contacted the WH/Obama campaign for any reason), and who still got spammed by Axelrod/Govdelivery. What they all had in common, though, was that they had each emailed their Democrat representatives…within a week of getting the Axelrod email…

Could there have been an unspoken/unofficial effort by the Democrat party asking its elected members to forward all constituent correspondence on health care to a centralized DC location….like, say, the “flag” snitch address? Perhaps that’s how these email lists were compiled.

Two callers in particular supported this theory.  One gentleman told me he’d emailed Rep. Melissa Bean (D-Ill.) to register opposition to the House health care bill. He received an email response from Bean's office the next day (entirely appropriate), followed by the Axelrod email a few days later.  Another caller said she'd contacted Sen. Debbie Stabenow's (D-Mich.) office for a similar reason.  She, too, heard first from Stabenow's staff, then from Axelrod.  Again, neither caller had ever been in touch with the White House.

The suggestion I raised above merits further scrutiny. Could the aforementioned "outside groups" include the political offices of elected Democrats?  It stands to reason: If the White House set up a (now defunct) email account asking average Americans to inform on one another regarding health care "misinformation," wouldn't constituent correspondence sent directly to elected representatives serve as a natural gold mine for culling opponents' arguments against the president's plan?  One wonders if certain Democratic members chose to pass along this information on their own initiative, or if they were responding to encouragement (read: following orders) from the White House to do so.

As others have pointed out, this story would be a behemoth of a scandal if, say, Republican members had forwarded anti-Iraq War emails to the Bush administration, which then blasted out unsolicited pro-war talking points from Karl Rove to thousands of unaware or unwilling recipients.   Continued...