Missing White House Emails: Gone and Never Coming Back

Posted by Steve Benen, The Carpetbagger Report at 10:13 AM on February 27, 2008.

The last we heard from the White House on the subject of its missing emails, one presidential spokesperson was telling the nation, "I wouldn't rule out that there were a potential 5 million e-mails lost.... We screwed up, and we're trying to fix it," while another presidential spokesperson was also telling the nation that White House officials have "absolutely no reason to believe that any emails are missing."

It's the kind of clear, helpful explanation we've come to expect from the Bush gang.

Yesterday, we learned that untold millions of emails are gone, and they're never coming back.

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.

Despite laws mandating otherwise, 80 White House officials routinely used private email accounts for government business, and the RNC deleted all WH emails through 2004. (Karl 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.)

Worse, this is only half the problem.

While dozens of top Bush aides were circumventing the Presidential Records Act with private emails, the White House was also responsible for creating a "primitive" email system of its own that created a high risk that data would be lost.

Steven McDevitt's written statements, placed on the public record at a congressional hearing, asserted that a study by White House technical staff in October 2005 turned up an estimated 1,000 days on which e-mail was missing.

Two federal laws require electronic messages to be preserved. [...]

In his written statements, McDevitt said he participated in meetings with White House counsel Harriet Miers and members of her staff. The meetings, in December 2005 and early 2006, occurred around the time McDevitt and other technical staffers were trying to determine how much e-mail was missing from the White House.

In a report presented at the hearing, Waxman's Democratic staff said difficulties arose in recovering e-mails for Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald in the CIA leak probe. Fitzgerald publicly disclosed the fact that the White House had an e-mail problem in early 2006.

There were no archived e-mails from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney from Sept. 30, 2003, to Oct. 6, 2003, just as the Justice Department was launching its investigation into whether anyone at the White House leaked Valerie Plame's CIA identity, according to documents provided to the House panel. The only e-mails that could be recovered for prosecutors were from the personal e-mail accounts of officials in Cheney's office, according to the report by Waxman's staff.

McDevitt's statements detailed shortcomings that he said have plagued the White House e-mail system for six years. He declared that:

* The White House had no complete inventory of e-mail files.

* Until mid-2005 the e-mail system had serious security flaws, in which "everyone" on the White House computer network had access to e-mail. McDevitt wrote that the "potential impact" of the security flaw was that there was no way to verify that retained data had not been modified.

* There was no automatic system to ensure that e-mails were archived and preserved.

Perhaps most startling of all, the Bush Administration managed to dismantle, apparently on purpose, the Clinton Administration's email archive system -- which worked just fine -- without replacing it with anything at all.

So, the emails from the RNC servers are gone, and the emails from the White House servers are gone. Coincidentally, the more important the dates and subject matter (Iraq war, White House criminal investigation), the more likely the emails are gone for good.

If there's a reasonable defense for the White House's handling of this, I honestly can't think of it.

Tagged as: republican party, rnc, white house emails, bush administration

Steve Benen is a freelance writer/researcher and creator of The Carpetbagger Report. In addition, he is the lead editor of Salon.com's Blog Report, and has been a contributor to Talking Points Memo, Washington Monthly, Crooks & Liars, The American Prospect, and the Guardian.