We learned earlier this year that most of the Bush White House’s senior staff, in blatant violation of the Presidential Records Act, sidestepped an internal email system, preferring to use private accounts provided by the Republican National Committee. Those thousands of emails, which included government business, are still missing after having been “accidentally” deleted. (The White House claims to be trying to recover them.)
As it turns out, that’s only one of two serious problems the Bush gang has in maintaining their electronic records. In an entirely different set of missing emails, however, we’re seeing quite a bit of movement this week. Dan Froomkin explains:
Why is it taking White House officials so long to restore millions of deleted e-mails from the backup tapes they claim to have?
The e-mails in question date from March 2003 to October 2005 — a crucial period that includes the Iraq invasion, a presidential election and Hurricane Katrina.
White House officials have known for more than two years that the messages were deleted — a clear violation of presidential records-preservation statutes. But the president’s aides won’t explain what happened, what sort of backups they have and what they’re doing about it.
Why, it’s almost as if the secretive White House is trying to hide its activities, laws and record-keeping rules notwithstanding. Who would have guessed?
When Congress asked about the 5 million missing emails, a White House lawyer suggested an outside IT contractor was responsible. The response appeared almost humorous, given that no such IT contractor exists.
Yesterday, in response to a lawsuit filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a federal judge disappointed the Bush gang terribly with a major court order.
A federal judge ordered the White House yesterday not to destroy any backup computer tapes of its e-mail, pending civil litigation seeking to learn more about what happened to a trove of messages missing from a 2 1/2 -year period earlier in the Bush presidency.
The Bush administration had opposed such an order, arguing that it is unnecessary because the White House administrative office already is preserving backup tapes in its possession. But U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. was not satisfied by that assurance and issued the formal order, which carries contempt penalties if violated.
Meredith Fuchs, a lawyer for the National Security Archive, said, the judge’s order “should stop any future destruction of e-mails, but the White House stopped archiving its e-mail in 2003 and we don’t know if some backup tapes for those e-mails were already taped over before we went to court. It’s a mystery.”
CREW’s court motion (.pdf) was apparently persuasive.
To the extent this particular set of tapes does not encompass all of the missing emails, it is essential that other copies are preserved, whether or not they were created specifically for disaster recovery efforts and whether or not they are currently in the OA’s [Office of Administration] possession, custody or control.
This information may also reveal the extent to which any of the defendants has already destroyed any back-up copies of the deleted email records or transferred them out of the OA’s possession, custody or control. Separate and apart from the illegality of any such action, it is critical to ascertain what back-up copies may have been destroyed to determine what additional steps can and should be taken to replicate those copies before the end of President Bush’s term in office. These other copies, however, whether in hard drives or other repositories, are only accessible for the duration of President Bush’s term, after which they will be cleaned out for the incoming president. Accordingly, it is critical to pinpoint what back-up copies are presently available and what back-up copies have been destroyed to explore, in the short time that remains, alternative methods of restoring the millions of deleted email records. […]
Under this administration’s watch, millions of email have gone missing and the White House has done nothing to reconstruct those historically important federal records or take steps to prevent further document destruction. When confronted with requests for information about the missing email problem, the White House has unilaterally removed itself from the public arena altogether by declaring that the OA is no longer an agency subject to government sunshine laws. In the short life of this lawsuit the White House defendants have refused to give adequate assurances of document preservation, refused to provide basic information and refused to meet with plaintiff’s counsel to plan for discovery.
Stay tuned.