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.
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....
...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 the ethics group.
“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 silence of the republicans who decried Clinton's email archival "problem" is deafening.
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