White House Policy: Save E-mails Yourself

We learned last week that the White House has lost about 5 million e-mails and has no record of four years of Karl Rove's GOP e-mail. The White House says that it did not properly advise staff on how to archive non-White House mail. But LA Times reports that the White House policy was clear, dating back to the start of the Bush Administration:

White House employee manuals distributed in early 2001 made it clear that any e-mails containing discussion of official matters should be preserved...

[A] memorandum from then-White House General Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, who is now attorney general, caution[ed] employees that "any e-mail relating to official business … qualifies as a presidential record."...

The manual adds: "If you happen to receive an e-mail on a personal account which otherwise qualifies as a presidential record, it is your duty to insure that it is saved as such by printing it out and saving it or by forwarding it to your White House e-mail account," the manual said...

This somewhat contradicts Wednesday's statement from the White House that it had not "done a good enough job at overseeing the practices of staff with political e-mail accounts."

According to Rep. Harry Waxman (D-CA), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the White House has made "a remarkable admission that raises serious legal and security issues."

cNet reports that the "deleted" Rove e-mails may still be accessible, although it might take some high-powered digital forensic programs to do so.

In the LA Times story, a GOP lawyer is quoted as saying the GOP was under no requirement to conform with the Presidential records act. But the cNet author says that the GOP rescinded "Rove's power to delete e-mails" two years ago "to preserve records for use in legal settings."

Another 2,500 Department of Justice e-mails were released on Friday as part of the investigation into the firing of United States Attorneys.