The Associated Press picked up CREW's request for an investigation of whether Department of Education staffers were violating the law by using private e-mail accounts for official business:

A private watchdog group asked the Education Department's inspector general on Wednesday to investigate the possible improper use of private e-mail accounts to conduct official department business.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics executive director Melanie Sloan said the apparent use of such accounts is making it difficult for the group to obtain documents it is seeking under the Freedom of Information Act.

Sloan said the group's lawyer, Dan Roth, had two separate conversations recently with Education Department officials in which he was told that some information he was seeking regarding a reading program might be unavailable because it was not stored in e-mail accounts accessible to the government. Department officials told Roth that agency employees often use private e-mail accounts rather than their government-issued accounts to do official business, Sloan said.

If department employees are using private accounts to send official e-mails, and those aren't being tracked or saved, that could be a violation of the Federal Records Act, she said. The law requires agencies to preserve records of official business.

And, big surprise: A spokesperson for the Department of Education denies the use of private e-mails for government business,"Mr. Roth's portrayal of the conversation is simply wrong," McLane said. "At no time was it suggested to Mr. Roth that department officials use private e-mail accounts for official business."

Okay. Let's review again some facts about the Department of Education, particularly the Reading First program.  On March 28, 2007, CREW filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Department of Education, seeking records related to the Reading First program.   At a congressional hearing last month, the Chair of the House Committee on Education and Labor, Rep. George Miller (D-CA), stated that the troubled "Reading First" program "sounds like a criminal enterprise to me."  The Department of Education's Inspector General also revealed that he's made criminal referrals based on his investigations of "Reading First."

So, members of Congress are talking "criminal enterprise."  The Department's own Inspector General has made "criminal referrals."   But the Department of Education staff would never use private e-mails because that's against the law. 

And, lest we forget, there is precedence in the Bush administration for using private e-mails to conduct government business.  In fact, the post just below this one relates to a Senate subpoena for the e-mails of top Presidential adviser Karl Rove.  The AP article even noted the ongoing e-mail scandals that have enveloped the Bush administration:

The allegations come amid a congressional investigation into whether presidential adviser Karl Rove and other top White House officials conducted official business through Republican National Committee e-mail accounts intended for political work, and then deleted them in violation of a law governing how White House records are handled.

But we're to believe that CREW's lawyer Dan Roth, who took contemporaneous notes from his conversations, completely misunderstood and mis-characterized the direct statements from the employees at the Department of Education -- because using private e-mails would never happen.  Right.