White House Losing Email Destruction Battle

[babylonsister]

White House Study Found 473 Days of E-Mail Gone

By Dan Eggen and Elizabeth Williamson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, January 18, 2008; Page A01

The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional Democrat.

The 2005 study -- whose credibility the White House attacked this week -- identified 473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices, said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

Waxman said he decided to release the summary after White House spokesman Tony Fratto said yesterday that there is "no evidence" that any White House e-mails from those years are missing. Fratto's assertion "seems to be an unsubstantiated statement that has no relation to the facts they have shared with us," Waxman said.

The competing claims were the latest salvos in an escalating dispute over whether the Bush administration has complied with long-standing statutory requirements to preserve official White House records -- including those reflecting potentially sensitive policy discussions -- for history and in case of any future legal demands.

Waxman said he is seeking testimony on the issue at a hearing next month from White House counsel Fred F. Fielding, National Archivist Allen Weinstein and Alan R. Swendiman, the politically appointed director of the Office of Administration, which produced the 2005 study at issue.

more...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/17/AR2008011703575.html?wpisrc=_rsspolitics

[madrchsod]

1. "the dog eat my homework"?

i thought the "adults" were in charge?

[Turbineguy]

2. What if it should turn out

that some IT person who obeys the law made a set of back-ups? Or that there was some automated back-up program?

[babylonsister]

3. I think if they wanted to locate those e-mails, they could. Too bad

I have such total contempt for this admin, but they've earned it.

[Turbineguy]

6. It just seems to me

that the system would be designed to keep the records and that there would be several redundancies. An accidental erasure would have a near zero probablility and a deliberate erasure would require extraordinary measures and by a number of persons at different levels.

It is the nature of governments to keep records. They may take time to find but they are there. The record keeping is placed outside the control of political persons.

[LiberalEsto]

4. Nixon's 18-minute tape gap

was NOTHING compared to 473 days of deliberate erasures of email!

I remember what a big deal was made about that 18-minute erasure during the investigation of the Watergate tapes. That pales by comparison to what the current Misadministration is doing.

I hope Pelosi and Reed manage to put some muscle into the investigation of these missing emails, but somehow I just don't have much hope. This destruction of evidence -- which BushCo was specifically told not to destroy, demonstrates once again the misguided idea of the "Imperial Executive" who answers to nobody, even Congress.

[countryjake]

5. Can we waterboard them for their hard drives?

I'm sure the CIA can find those archives for the white house.

[Rosemary2205]

7. Bullshit

They will all stay in office and if anyone sees the inside of a jail, it will be some low level underling. I call that winning, not losing, but that's just me.

[Blarch]

8. Why doesn't Waxman crawl back under the rock he lived under ?

Fuck that traitor.

Sibel Edmounds was promised hearings by Waxman...but now he refuses to do so.

[MGKrebs]

9. Fred Fielding. This is just surreal.

That guy was John Dean's deputy during the Watergate scandal.