Today was supposed to be a court-imposed deadline for the White House to produce emails from the first couple of years of Bush’s presidency. Just a few minutes before midnight, the White House came up with a new rationale for failing to cooperate — it deleted the emails and taped over the backups.
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. […]
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.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which has been fighting the Bush gang over these elusive emails, noted, “The White House has now admitted that it does not have an effective system for storing and preserving emails. This is no mere technicality; it is this failure that led to the likely destruction of over 10 million emails. What the White House has not explained is why it abandoned the electronic record-keeping system used by the prior administration — a system that properly preserved White House email — but did not replace it with another effective and appropriate system.”
And let’s also not lose sight of the significance of the timeline. The missing emails were originally sent between March 2003 and October 2003 — a seven-month period that includes the launch of the war in Iraq, the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity as an undercover CIA official, and the beginning of the criminal investigation of the Bush White House.
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.
Yes, of course they are. Why would anyone question the Bush gang’s good-faith efforts at disclosure?
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.”
One wonders how Fratto keeps a straight face. Hopefully, for his sake, he responded via press release.
“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, told the AP.
Also missing from the White House’s latest explanation of the missing email is why, more than two years after it discovered the problem, the White House still cannot say what happened, why it happened and how many emails were affected. And the White House has yet to offer an explanation for why it never acted to recover any of the missing emails, even when presented with a recovery plan by its own Office of Administration.
Of course, these guys have proven themselves to be a reliable, trustworthy bunch. I’m sure there’s an innocent explanation, right?