The White House failed to properly archive its email messages for almost 500 separate days between 2003-2005. Bush Study Revealed Email Back-Ups Lacking From 2003 To 2005By Cliff Montgomery – Jan. 20th, 2008The Bush Administration failed to archive its email messages for such important White House offices as the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President for almost 500 separate days between 2003-2005, according to an internal White House audit summary revealed Thursday by a House panel chairman.The 2005 White House study–which was viciously attacked in public last week by, of all entities, the White House itself–discovered that on 473 separate days, at least one White House office had failed to store any electronic messages, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) recently told The Washington Post.Waxman added that he chose to release the audit summary after Bush Administration spin doctor Tony Fratto claimed on Thursday that there is “no evidence” that even a single White House email from 2003 to 2005 is missing.”From everything that we can tell, our analysis of our back-up systems, we just–we have no reason to believe that any email, at all, are missing,” asserted Fratto.Fratto’s contention “seems to be an unsubstantiated statement that has no relation to the facts they have shared with us,” Waxman told the Post.It is a far cry from what the Bush Administration itself has been saying–both in public and to government investigators–for a few years now.Fellow administration spin doctor Dana Perino flatly told the press on April 13th, 2007, that possibly millions of White House emails from March 2003 to October 2005 had been lost.”I wouldn’t rule out that there were a potential 5 million emails lost,” Perino told reporters at the 2007 press gaggle. [Italics added]”And, again, I think that one of the things that’s difficult is the things that we don’t know. We don’t know them, but we’re trying to find them out. And there are ways that you can retrieve any emails that are potentially lost,” she added.Meredith Fuchs, general counsel for The National Security Archive (NSA)–a private government watchdog group and one of the principal parties now suing the Bush Administration to discover what happened to those emails–thinks it “odd that…four-and-a-half years later [White House officials] still have not yet figured out whether or what emails were deleted,” she stated in a Jan. 16th NSA press release.“It also is troubling that the problem may have started before October 2003, and they acknowledge that back-ups prior to that period were recycled and are gone,” stated Fuchs.”Two years after a special prosecutor concluded that key emails were missing from the White House system administered by the Office of Administration, the White House…[still] doesn’t know if any emails are missing,” added NSA Director Tom Blanton in the press release.The loss of Bush Administration emails first was disclosed on January 23rd, 2006. That’s when prosecutors in the Lewis “Scooter” Libby trial admitted to Libby’s defense counsel that it would be impossible to supply copies of White House email records, “because not all email records from the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system.” The full extent of the matter only became obvious to most on April 2007, when Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) released a damning report declaring that more than 5 million White House emails had been lost. As noted above, Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino at that time acknowledged that “a potential 5 million emails” may have been lost.On January 8th, 2008, Magistrate Judge John Facciola of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered Bush officials to finally reveal if copies of perhaps millions of lost emails are archived on computer backup tapes. The White House essentially has responded that it does not yet know what happened to the emails.The Court has pointed out that the issue of this potentially missing data is “time-sensitive”, since any back-ups of the lost emails “are increasingly likely to be deleted or overridden with the passage of time.”“To date, the White House has evaded answering questions about whether it permanently destroyed over 5 million emails about issues such as Hurricane Katrina, the firing of United States Attorneys, and the exposure of Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent,” commented NSA general counsel Fuchs in a January 8th statement.Judge Henry Kennedy, Jr. previously issued a court order commanding the Bush Administration to preserve all email back-up tapes retained by the Executive Office of the President (EOP). Judge Kennedy also consolidated the Archive’s case with another suit over the emails filed by CREW.Like what you’re reading so far? 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How Necessary Laws Are Killed These Days
Lawmakers generally only fight to protect the things they care about – and all too often, that just doesn’t include the lives of most of their constituents.
