Fitzgerald came close to viewing Rove email account

The Senate Judiciary Committee is continuing its fight to obtain the emails on Karl Rove's RNC account to settle once and for all the White House adviser's roll in the U.S. Attorney firing scandal.  Robert Luskin, Karl Rove's lawyer, is refusing to hand them over because he claims "there’s nothing on there that’s relevant" to the investigation.

But back in 2004, as Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was in the middle of the CIA leak case, he came very close to seeing Rove's email account first-hand:

Back in April of 2004, Rove and Luskin had allowed the prosecutor in that case, Patrick Fitzgerald,to obtain images of the hard drives of a home computer, a personallaptop, a Republican National Committee laptop and a handheld device,all being used by Rove at the time. After Fitzgerald combed through theinformation, he returned the hard-drive images to Luskin in sealedcontainers, as part of an agreement on evidence handling. That way,Rove’s personal information could get greater protection from pryingeyes.

Of course, this was prior to when the Justice Department fired the nine U.S. Attorneys.  It was also before Alberto Gonzales became Attorney General.  However, that episode with Fitzgerald and Luskin does show how difficult it is to investigate Karl Rove without getting bogged down in the legal process.

If Fitzgerald was unable to gain complete access to Rove's email account, then it will be near impossible for Congress to do just that.