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By PETE YOST (AP) – 48 minutes ago
WASHINGTON — Computer technicians have found 22 million missing White House e-mails from the administration of President George W. Bush and the Obama administration is searching for dozens more days’ worth of potentially lost e-mail from the Bush years, according to two groups that filed suit over the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic record keeping system.
The two private groups — Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive — said Monday they were settling the lawsuits they filed against the Executive Office of the President in 2007.
It will be years before the public sees any of the recovered e-mails because they will now go through the National Archives’ process for releasing presidential and agency records. Presidential records of the Bush administration won’t be available until 2014 at the earliest.
The tally of missing e-mails, the additional searches and the settlement are the latest development in a political controversy that stemmed from the Bush White House’s failure to install a properly working electronic record keeping system. Two federal laws require the White House to preserve its records.
The two private organizations say there is not yet a final count on the extent of missing White House e-mail and there may never be a complete tally.
Meredith Fuchs, general counsel to the National Security Archive, said “many poor choices were made during the Bush administration and there was little concern about the availability of e-mail records despite the fact that they were contending with regular subpoenas for records and had a legal obligation to preserve their records.”
“We may never discover the full story of what happened here,” said Melanie Sloan, CREW’s executive director. “It seems like they just didn’t want the e-mails preserved.”
Sloan said the latest count of misplaced e-mails “gives us confirmation that the Bush administration lied when they said no e-mails were missing.”
The two groups say the 22 million White House e-mails were previously mislabeled and effectively lost.
The government now can find and search 22 million more e-mails than it could in late 2005 and the settlement means that the Obama administration will restore 94 calendar days of e-mail from backup tape, said Kristen Lejnieks, an attorney representing the National Security Archive.
Sheila Shadmand, another lawyer representing the National Security Archive, said the Obama administration is making a strong effort to clean up “the electronic data mess left behind by the prior administration.”
Records released as a result of the lawsuits reveal that the Bush White House was aware during the president’s first term in office that the e-mail system had serious archiving problems, which didn’t become publicly known until 2006, when federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald disclosed them during his criminal investigation of the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame.
A Microsoft Corp. document on the Bush White House’s e-mail problems states that Microsoft was called in to help find electronic messages in October 2003, more than two years before the problem surfaced publicly. October 2003 was the month that the Justice Department began gearing up its criminal investigation into who in the Bush administration leaked the identity of Plame, the wife of Bush administration war critic Joseph Wilson.
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
22 million Bush White House e-mails reportedly found
Two groups say 22 million missing Bush White House e-mails have been found, the Associated Press reports.
Update at 3:25 p.m. ET: The e-mails had been mislabeled and effectively lost, according to the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the National Security Archive (NSA), which announced a final settlement of their lawsuits against the executive branch. The 22 million e-mails were found or reconstructed from disaster recovery backup tapes.
The Obama White House will restore 94 calendar days from backup tapes.
CREW explains:
The dates for restoration were chosen based on email volume and external events because there simply was not enough money to restore all the missing emails. In addition, the EOP will continue to provide CREW and the NSA with records documenting the missing email problem, the response of the Bush White House to that problem, and the options the Bush White House considered for preserving electronic records, but inexplicably rejected.
The NSA first sued the Bush White House in 2007 to recover 5 million missing e-mails. CREW revealed in 2008 that the White House had discovered the problem in the fall of 2005.
The lawsuits accused the Bush administration and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) of taking no action after it was revealed that millions of e-mails went missing from White House computer servers for 2½ years. the Bush White House also knowingly kept using a broken system to preserve electronic records.
“We now know that many poor choices were made during the Bush Administration and there was little concern about the availability of e-mail records despite the fact that they were contending with regular subpoenas for records and had a legal obligation to preserve their records for the nation’s long term historical memory,” Meredith Fuchs, the NSA’s general counsel, said in a statement. “We have been briefed on the system in use since the beginning of the Obama Administration and we believe that the system now in use fixes the significant problems with the prior system, including by capturing everything, properly categorizing the e-mails, and preventing unauthorized deletion.”
Read the terms of the agreement.
The Obama White House has already produced thousands of pages of documents relating to these issues. CREW has posted them here.
(Updated by Michael Winter)
22 Million Missing E-mails from Bush White House Found
White House computer technicians have found 22 million e-mails that were believed to have been lost during President George W. Bush’s administration, according to the Associated Press.
The discovery was announced Monday by the National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which filed lawsuits against the Executive Office of the President (EOP) in 2007 for the e-mails.
The two groups had initially filed a Freedom of Information Act request for e-mails in the wake of a scandal involving the Justice Department, which had fired U.S. attorneys around the country in an apparent political bid to rid the department of prosecutors who didn’t adhere to the White House’s conservative agenda. The missing emails were also potentially crucial to the investigation into the Valerie Plame-CIA leak scandal.
The groups eventually filed lawsuits after the EOP revealed that it had lost about 5 million e-mails from its servers between January 2003 and July 2005 because the e-mails had not been archived properly per the Presidential Records Act. Among other things, CREW sought records about the EOP’s e-mail management system, about retained and missing e-mails and about any audit reports that might have revealed potential problems with the e-mail system.
The newly discovered e-mails were apparently mislabeled and were recently uncovered by contractors hired by the White House. The e-mails will eventually be made available to the public after they are archived through the National Archives and Records Administration.
