Last week, the White House denied responsibility for its spam emails in support of health care “reform”. They blamed unspecified third-parties for adding names to the White House’s mailing list.
Now it’s revealed that the White House hired a private contractor to send the emails:
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. . .
The revelation comes after the White House acknowledged this week that people were receiving unsolicited e-mails from the administration about health care reform and suggested the problem was with third-party groups that placed the recipients’ names on the distribution list.
(Via Hot Air.)
Apparently the government uses Govdelivery for most of its official email distribution:
Govdelivery does extensive work with a bevy of federal, state, and local agencies, including 11 Cabinet-level departments such as Defense, State, and Justice. Among the tasks Govdelivery performs are FBI internal e-mails and external regional crime alerts, and FEMA hurricane or other natural disaster alerts.
In fact, before Jan. 1, Govdelivery handled 85 percent of mass e-mail deliveries for federal agencies.
Whether Govdelivery commonly does political work, and who pays for it, isn’t clear, but I’m sure someone will ask. In any case, both Govdelivery and the White House agree that the White House, and not Govdelivery, is responsible for the mailing list.
POSTSCRIPT: Ed Morrissey claims that the White House has blamed Govdelivery for the spam, but I don’t know where he’s getting that. Perhaps he’s confused about which third parties the White House was referring to. (Indeed, they were deliberately vague.) But Fox News is clear that they were not referring to Govdelivery:
The White House insists that Govdelivery aggregates nothing and plays no role in the formation of its e-mail list; it is merely an end-product e-mail distributor.
Internet Scofflaw 