[Infowarrior] - GOP Halts Effort to Retrieve White House E-Mails

[Richard Forno]

GOP Halts Effort to Retrieve White House E-Mails

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/26/AR2008022602
312.html?hpid=topnews

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 27, 2008; Page A02

After promising last year to search its computers for tens of thousands of
e-mails sent by White House officials, the Republican National Committee has
informed a House committee that it no longer plans to retrieve the
communications by restoring computer backup tapes, the panel's chairman said
yesterday.

The move increases the likelihood that an untold number of RNC e-mails
dealing with official White House business during the first term of the Bush
administration -- including many sent or received by former presidential
adviser Karl Rove -- will never be recovered, said House Democrats and
public records advocates.

The RNC had previously told the House Oversight and Government Reform
Committee that it was attempting to restore e-mails from 2001 to 2003, when
the RNC had a policy of purging all e-mails, including those to and from
White House officials, after 30 days. But Chairman Henry A. Waxman
(D-Calif.) disclosed during a hearing yesterday that the RNC has now said it
"has no intention of trying to restore the missing White House e-mails."

"The result is a potentially enormous gap in the historical record," Waxman
said, including the buildup to the Iraq war.

RNC spokesman Danny Diaz said in a statement that the committee "is fully
compliant with the spirit and letter of the law." He declined further
comment.

Administration officials have acknowledged that Rove and many other White
House officials routinely used RNC accounts for government business, despite
rules requiring that they conduct such business through official
communications channels. The RNC also deleted all e-mails until 2004, when
it exempted White House officials from its e-mail purging policy.

About 80 White House aides used RNC accounts for official government
business, committee staff said. Rove, for example, sent or received 140,000
e-mails on RNC servers from 2002 to 2007, and more than half involved
official ".gov" accounts, the panel has said.

The RNC dispute is part of a broader debate over whether the Bush
administration has complied with long-standing statutory requirements to
preserve official White House records -- including those reflecting
potentially sensitive policy discussions -- for history and in case of
future legal demands.

The committee is investigating allegations that vast stores of official Bush
administration e-mails have also gone missing from the White House, which
scrapped a Clinton-era archiving system and has struggled with data
retention problems.

A former White House technology manager told the committee in statements
released yesterday that the Bush administration's e-mail system "was
primitive and the risk that data would be lost was high."

Steven McDevitt, who left the White House in 2006, said he supervised an
internal study that found hundreds of days in which no electronic messages
were stored for one or more White House offices from January 2003 to August
2005. The study stated a range when tallying the total number of days in
which each office had no recorded e-mails, from 473 -- which had been
previously reported -- to more than 1,000, McDevitt said.

McDevitt also said security was so lax that e-mail could be modified by
anyone on the computer network until the middle of 2005.

Administration officials defended their efforts to fix the problems, and
said they are still working to locate and identify e-mails reported as
missing. "We are very energized about getting to the bottom of this," said
Theresa Payton, chief information officer at the Office of Administration.

At the hearing, Payton and GOP lawmakers attacked the 2005 White House study
overseen by McDevitt, calling it flawed and unreliable. McDevitt said the
250-page study involved numerous senior technology officials as well as
outside contractors.

Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (Va.), the committee's ranking Republican, said in
a statement that the missing e-mail allegations are "based on a discredited
internal report conveniently leaked to the media." He also said that
yesterday's hearing was "less about preserving records and more about
resurrecting the spurious claim that the White House 'lost millions of
official e-mails.' "

Davis also said, based on a briefing by Payton, that the actual number of
days with missing e-mails was 202. "A substantial portion of the so-called
'missing' e-mails appear not to be missing at all, just filed in the wrong
digital drawer," Davis said. No other committee member followed up on that
allegation during the hearing.