White House Re-used e-Mail Backup Tapes
Two groups are suing the White House -- Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) and the National Security Archive -- because of emails missing from 2003-2005. As a result of the lawsuit, last week US Magistrate Judge John Facciola "gave the White House five business days to report whether computer backup tapes contain e-mails written between 2003 and 2005," a period that includes the outing of Valerie Plame and the build up to the Iraq War. Tuesday's court-ordered deadline "forced the White House to reveal information it previously had refused to provide."
The Executive Office of the President is subject to the Federal Records Act, which made these communications publicly-owned. Millions of emails are reportedly missing; however, White House spokesman Tony Fratto asserts:
There is no basis to say that the White House has destroyed any evidence or engaged in any misconduct.
From AP:
The White House ``does not know if any e-mails were not properly preserved in the archiving process'' from 2003 to 2005, said the statement by Theresa Payton, chief information officer for the White House Office of Administration. She said the White House continues its efforts to find out and that an assessment will be completed in the ``near term.''
From the Washington Post:
Anne L. Weismann, chief counsel for [CREW], said the disclosure raises new questions about the Bush administration's management of public records. "They didn't have what any archival person would consider to be an electronic record-keeping system," Weismann said. "These are not the steps of a White House committed to preserving records or meeting its obligations under the law."
With this new filing, the White House has admitted that although it has long known about the missing emails, it did nothing to recover them, or discover how and why they went missing in the first place.
From Fox:
"The White House seems to be changing its story,” [Meredith Fuchs, the National Security Archive’s general counsel] said. “At first, it acknowledged over 5 million missing e-mails. Now it says it ‘has undertaken an independent effort to determine whether there may be anomalies in Exchange e-mail counts’ during the 2003 to 2005 period.”
As part of the lawsuit, CREW and NSA have asked the court to require the White House to "install a new electronic records management system similar to the one they discontinued when they changed e-mail servers from IBM Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange in 2002." This feels like locking the barn after the horse has been stolen.
America first learned of issues surrounding archival of White House email when Patrick Fitzgerald was investigating the Valerie Plame case. That's when we found out that White House staff, including Karl Rove, sent official mail using GOP mail servers, circumventing archival.
Last November, in response to the lawsuit,US Federal Court Judge Henry H. Kennedy directed the White House to "preserve media , no matter how described, presently in their possess or under their custody or control, that were created with the intention of preserving data in the event of its inadvertent destruction."
Henry Waxman told the National Archives that a 2005 review by White House staff revealed missing email, days with no mail in backup. This is in direct conflict with the White House filing on Tuesday. So here we are, 2+ years later, with the White House saying that they don't really know if emails are missing or if they're all preserved. One wonders ... what the heck were they doing those two years? Playing Tweedle-dee Dee and Tweedle-dee Dum?
- GWB43.com, AttorneyGate and Federal Records Requirements
- White House Policy: Save Those E-Mails Yourself
Other coverage: The Carpetbagger Report.