Missing E-mail: We've Been Down This Road Before

I think it is fascinating that, upon taking office, the Bush White House apparently learned nothing from the headaches that the Clinton Administration went through in 2000 regarding e-mail back-up. A cynical person might think that they were, instead, remembering Iran-Contra (pdf):

The relevance of e-mail evidence had been established several years earlier in a case from the Iran-Contra scandal. Oliver North and John Poindexter unsuccessfully argued that their e-mail correspondence should not be admitted into evidence. They had deleted their e-mail, but the messages were preserved on backup tapes—a situation strikingly similar to [the Clinton] case.

Rather than an act of commission (a decision to recycle -- ie, not maintain -- back-up tapes), as is the case with the Bush White House, the Clinton White House problem resulted from an act of omission (a system failure) in its Automated Records Management System (ARMS).

Flashback to 2000
In March 2000, Republican leadership in the House called for a special counsel to investigate missing White House e-mail. Justice said Robert Ray, who picked up where Ken Starr left off, was doing just that.

Note: it's important to remember that e-mail was a new way of working in the 1990s. And in the early-90s, e-mail was a walled garden: you could only communicate with people who had the same e-mail service. This was also the dawn of the Web.

Three contract employees charged that they had been threatened with firing and jail if they told anyone about the problem. The White House e-mail administrator subsequently denied that charge, under oath, and also said he had not advised the President of the extent of the problem.

Betty Lambuth, a whistleblower, discovered in 1998 that about 100,000 emails had not been preserved by the sophisticated back-up system, ARMS, which was designed to store all email in a single, searchable database. Later investigation revealed the system was missing mail from about 500 White House officials. In October 1988, the White House "solicited a proposal from Northrop Grumman in October 1998 to 'recover the missing records'," but recovery did not begin until 2000. (pdf)

Note: The Clinton White House used Lotus Notes system, an IBM product; the Bush White House switched to Microsoft Outlook. This tech author argues that it wasn't the conversion that caused the Bush White House problem -- one of the first defenses offered by Dana Perino. The current explanation is that recycling back-up tapes is standard business practice.

In July 2000, the White House began copying about 3,400 tapes back-up tapes for analysis; the FBI had to approve this forensic process.

Note: The Bush White House has made this possibility -- recover missing e-mail from back-up tapes -- more expensive and less probable by recycling (ie, overwriting) the tapes.

A key player in the investigation in 2000 was Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group. A key player in 2008 is CREW, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

What, Exactly, Happened in The Clinton White House?
Starting in August 1996, ARMS did not archive email from one mail server. This server handled mail for about 500 White House officials. It was human error: improper naming. (The problem was a case-sensitive name; it makes me wonder if the culprit was a Windows person, since all other systems at that time were case-sensitive, I think.) A different problem meant that from 1994-2000, mail in the office of the vice president was improperly archived. (pdf)

So here we are, with politicians willfully ignoring the Presidential Records Act in an era with ever increasing use of electronic communication. And where is Judicial Watch on the subject that they were so incensed about in 2000? Silent. As for CREW, there's no mention of the Clinton White House problem, only its solution, in this 2007 summary of the Bush problem.

Color me disappointed. Not surprised, just disappointed.

Congress -- and we the people -- have to make it crystal clear that the Presidential Records Act covers all electronic communication: email, IM, text and, yes, records of Skype and cell phone calls. Failure to comply -- when the lack of compliance is something other than human error -- should be a felony. And the designated jailee? The highest ranking official: the President. Only with culpability will we get responsibility.

^tip

Related:

• GWB43.com, AttorneyGate and Federal Records Requirements
• Judge To White House: Keep All E-Mail
• White House Policy: Save E-mails Yourself
• Presidential Records Act