White House E-mails

Dan Eggen and Elizabeth Williamson report for the Washington Post (Jan 18, 2008, White House Study Found 473 Days of E-Mail Gone):

The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional
Democrat.

The 2005 study -- whose credibility the White House attacked this week -- identified 473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices, said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.)....

...Waxman said he is seeking testimony on the issue at a hearing next month from White House counsel Fred F. Fielding, National Archivist Allen Weinstein and Alan R. Swendiman, the politically appointed director of the Office of Administration, which produced the 2005 study at issue....

...The White House is required by law to preserve e-mails considered presidential or federal records, and it is the target of several lawsuits seeking information about missing data and efforts to preserve electronic communications.

The internal study found that for Bush's executive office, no e-mails were archived on 12 separate days between December 2003 and February 2004, Waxman said. Vice President Cheney's office showed no electronic messages on 16 occasions from September 2003 to May 2005.

Archived e-mails were missing from even more days in other parts of the White House, the analysis found. The Council on Environmental Quality and the Council of Economic Advisers, for example, showed no stored e-mails for 2 1/2 months beginning in November 2003. The Office of Management and Budget showed no messages for 59 days -- including the period from Nov. 1, 2003, to Dec. 9, 2003 -- and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative showed no e-mail for 73 days.

Waxman said he decided to release the summary after White House spokesman Tony Fratto said yesterday that there is "no evidence" that any White House e-mails from those years are missing. Fratto's assertion "seems to be an unsubstantiated statement that has no relation to the facts they have shared with us," Waxman said....

...Two advocacy groups suing the Bush administration over its e-mail policies, Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) and the National Security Archive, also said yesterday that the White House's new statements are incomplete and contrary to earlier acknowledgments that some e-mails are missing.

CREW also asserted in court papers filed yesterday that "critical and highly relevant evidence may have been destroyed" by the White House.....

Bush Admin Pulls a "Clinton"

Pete Yost reports for the Associated Press on the Detroit Free Press (Jan 16, 2008, White House may have erased e-mail evidence):

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.

AG Mukasey Limits White House Access

Marisa Taylor on McClatchy Newspapers reports on Attorney General Mukasey's reversal of Bush Administration policy:

...The original policy authorized more than 40 Justice Department officials and 400 White House officials to know about ongoing investigations, according to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, a leading Democratic proponent of changing the policy.

During the Clinton administration, seven White House and Justice officials were permitted to receive such information.

Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr said Mukasey's new policy mirrors the Clinton administration's, but allows more officials to receive details about national security matters.

Mukasey's predecessor, Alberto Gonzales, resigned after a nine-month long firestorm over the ouster of nine U.S. attorneys and allegations of improper political meddling in Justice Department business.

One of the fired U.S. attorneys, David Iglesias of New Mexico, accused Republican Senator Pete Domenici of trying to pressure him to indict Democrats before the 2006 congressional elections. Domenici admitted calling Iglesias but denied making any inappropriate demands.

White House officials also acknowledged contacting the Justice Department after they received Republican complaints about the department's handling of election fraud investigations.

White House visitor logs are public documents

Matt Apuzzo at the Associated Press has this story on the Chicago Tribune:

WASHINGTON - White House visitor logs are public documents, a federal judge ruled Monday, rejecting a legal strategy that the Bush administration had hoped would get around public records laws and let them keep their guests a secret.

The ruling is a blow to the Bush administration, which has fought the release of records showing visits by prominent religious conservatives.

Visitor records are created by the Secret Service, which is subject to the Freedom of Information Act. But the Bush administration has ordered the data turned over to the White House, where they are treated as presidential records outside the scope of the public records law.

But U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth ruled logs from the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney's residence remain Secret Service documents and are subject to public records requests.

In a lawsuit brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal watchdog group, Lamberth ordered the Secret Service to turn over visitor logs regarding nine conservative religious commentators, including James Dobson, Gary Bauer and Jerry Falwell.

"I think it's hugely significant," said Anne L. Weismann, the watchdog group's chief counsel. "The judge saw their arguments for what they were."...

...In a separate case, CREW had sought an order declaring illegal a Bush administration policy under which the Secret Service destroys its copies of the logs once they are turned over to the White House.

In that second case involving White House visits by disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Lamberth said he did not have the authority to issue such a ruling.

Because the logs were declared Secret Service records, however, they cannot be destroyed without approval from the National Archives.

The Bush administration had sought to have the case moved to another judge by consolidating it with a similar lawsuit before U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer, an appointee of President Bush....

...On Monday, Collyer and Lamberth agreed to consolidate the two Abramoff-related cases before Lamberth, even though Collyer in accordance with long-standing courthouse practice would have dealt with both because the case she was hearing was the older of the two.