Those Missing Whitehouse E-Mails are in the News

[RMNIXON]

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House has acknowledged recycling its backup computer tapes of e-mail before October 2003, raising the possibility that many electronic messages — including those pertaining to the CIA leak case — have been taped over and are gone forever.

The disclosure came minutes before midnight Tuesday under a court-ordered deadline that forced the White House to reveal information it has previously refused to provide.

Among the e-mails that could be lost are messages swapped by any White House officials involved in discussions about leaking a CIA officer's identity to reporters.

Before October 2003, the White House recycled its backup tapes "consistent with industry best practices," according to a sworn statement by a White House aide.

Backup tapes are the last line of defense for saving electronic records.

Separately, the statement reveals the extent to which the White House is apparently unable to answer how many e-mails are missing from White House servers.

The White House "does not know if any e-mails were not properly preserved in the archiving process," said the statement by Theresa Payton, chief information officer for the White House Office of Administration. "We are continuing our efforts," said Payton, whose staff is responsible for the White House e-mail system.

If the e-mails were not saved, the White House might have violated two laws requiring preservation of documents that fall into the categories of federal records or presidential records.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said that "there is no basis to say that the White House has destroyed any evidence or engaged in any misconduct."

Fratto said that despite the recycling, some tapes should contain e-mails from before October 2003.

"Of course the disaster recovery backup tapes were, at one time, recycled," said Fratto. "However, since October 2003, the Office of Administration has retained and preserved its disaster recovery tapes. The disaster recovery system is set up to regularly back up everything on the network for the Executive Office of the president at the time of each backup."

The seven-page document filed in U.S. District Court says the White House in October 2003 "began preserving and storing all backup tapes and continues to do so." Payton said this means that e-mails sent or received in the 2003-2005 time period should be contained on existing backup tapes.

The period of 2003 and 2005 is the time frame at issue in lawsuits seeking information about possibly millions of missing e-mails at the Bush White House.

Payton's sworn statement was filed in response to a federal court order last week in lawsuits by two private groups, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive.

The lawsuits allege that millions of e-mails are missing from White House servers. The recycling of backup tapes leaves doubt whether any missing e-mails will be recoverable.

"If the backup tapes have been erased or taped over or recycled, it's hard to imagine where we will find copies of many lost e-mails," said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel to the National Security Archive, said in an interview Wednesday.

"It appears that the White House has now destroyed the evidence of its misconduct," said Anne Weismann, the chief counsel for CREW, the other private group that sued.

"The White House declaration raises more questions than it answers, specifically the likelihood that for a very significant period of time — March 2003 to October 2003 — the White House recycled its backup tapes," said Weismann.

"As a result there may be no way to recover the missing e-mails from a period in which the U.S. decided to go to war with Iraq, White House officials leaked the identity of Valerie Plame and the Justice Department started a criminal investigation of the White House," the lawyer said.

The sworn statement by Payton did not say how early in the Bush administration the recycling of backup computer tapes began. The statement does not say why the White House stopped recycling backup tapes in October 2003.

In the period of July until October of 2003, the White House was dealing with the Valerie Plame leak controversy. In July, at least three presidential aides leaked Plame's CIA identity to the news media after her husband suggested the administration had manipulated intelligence in the run-up to the war in Iraq. The Justice Department began investigating the leak in September 2003.

In January 2006, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald said that not all White House e-mail had been saved through the normal archiving process.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
__________________________________________________ ______________

I thought I would toss a little Red Meat to the more conspiracy minded. Even though the Plame Case may be the biggest "Much Ado About Nothing" in recent White House Scandal History that will not stop an absence of evidence as being absolute proof of anything and everything.


So have fun...............................

[Thorgrim]

#1 I thought IT people said there were more backups besides some stupid recovery system they had

#2 I'm more worried this is about lying about our "reasoning" for invading Iraq

[RMNIXON]

Memories.

Wall Street Journal:


Trust Justice


March 24, 2000 1:48 a.m.


One of the enduring memories of the Clinton years will be all those missing pieces of evidence. From lost Rose Law Firm billing records to suddenly uncovered videotapes of Oval Office fundraisers, this White House has turned stalling and practiced incompetence into a dark art. Now comes the news that the Justice Department has opened a criminal probe into hundreds of thousands of e-mails that the White House never turned over to Congress because of a computer breakdown.

This investigation is going to be handled by the Justice Department's campaign finance task force. The task force says it will look into whether employees working on the White House computers were threatened with retaliation. The latter was the subject of hearings Thursday by Rep. Dan Burton's House Government Oversight committee.

Let's back up a second. Before Thursday's announcement of a "criminal" probe by DoJ, a civil suit over the missing emails was up and running from the pesky but valuable group Judicial Watch. The feds made two requests Thursday about this lawsuit.

First, lawyers from the White House asked the court to put off its consideration of the suit pending DoJ's criminal inquiry. And the Justice Department task force's lead lawyer, Robert Conrad, asserted that continuing the civil action "would interfere with and potentially compromise the task force's own investigation of the pending allegations." And he said they'd let the civil folks and the court know when they were done.

Ah, er, uh, hmmmmm. Does anyone other than maybe their mothers believe any of this?

In all seriousness, it is unhappy indeed when the day arrives that the U.S. Department of Justice announces its intention to undertake a criminal investigation of matters involving the White House and the proper response is, at the least, skepticism. We're asked here to believe that the foot-draggingest federal lawyers any administration has ever outputted will somehow finish this email probe before, say, November.

Six Northrup-Grumman contract employees who once worked at the White House said before Mr. Burton's committee Thursday they were ordered not to tell anyone about the e-mails after the breakdown was discovered in 1998. White House Counsel Beth Nolan has acknowledged some of the missing e-mails involve Mr. Gore's office. Touchy stuff.

The Justice Department's sudden interest in this comes some three months after most of these e-mail revelations were made in Judge Royce Lamberth's court. The judge is hearing a Privacy Act lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch on behalf of the 900 people whose FBI files turned up in the Clinton White House. This is the lawsuit that Justice's Mr. Conrad says would compromise his investigation.

We'd give a lot to be able to believe that. If so, it would mean that in the post-Independent Counsel world, a functioning Justice Department could be depended on to account for the government's underlying institutional integrity. But we can't forget this same administration's desperate moves, just before the 1996 elections, to keep Democratic fundraiser John Huang from testifying before Judge Lamberth.

So much has disappeared down their black hole. When DoJ proves something like Thursday's announcement is real, we'll applaud. We'll withhold the applause for now.

Free Preview - WSJ.com



Yes, I know:

[Scrum]

Not just a , but a preemptive

[DosEquis]

Originally Posted by Thorgrim

#1 I thought IT people said there were more backups besides some stupid recovery system they had

#2 I'm more worried this is about lying about our "reasoning" for invading Iraq

#1 I said that repeatedly...on multiple forums...on multiple days. Nobody in government brought it up, and nobody in government demanded the data restored. If you gave me the tapes I could have restored all those emails in less than 1 hour.

[Donkey®]

So let's get it straight...


Emails about the possible outing of a CIA operative < Getting Bill and Hillary to release documents from his administration that amount to absolutely nothing in order to discredit her and her campaign.


Got it.

[WickedLou9]

The only thing I don't like about this whole deal is that our government has some pretty poor record keeping practices. My IT department in our relatively small company has files backed up dating back to our inception. We have them on tape somewhere in a secure location. Tapes are so cheap it would make no sense to re-use them and tape over old archives.
What is wrong with our governmnet that it can't effectively run it's own business? Morons.

[Stylerod]

Originally Posted by Donkey®

So let's get it straight...


Emails about the possible outing of a CIA operative < Getting Bill and Hillary to release documents from his administration that amount to absolutely nothing in order to discredit her and her campaign.


Got it.

It's ok for Democrats, not ok for Republicans. Got it.

[Donkey®]

Originally Posted by Stylerod

It's ok for Democrats, not ok for Republicans. Got it.

Fishing expedition < evidence of a particular crime.