Missing White House E-Mails Traced, Justice Aide Says

What people who deal with e-mail have always known, sooner or later
the "lost" or "destroyed" 14 million "missing" from the White House
files would be found.


Missing White House E-Mails Traced, Justice Aide Says

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 15, 2009; A09

A Justice Department lawyer told a federal judge yesterday that the
Bush administration will meet its legal requirement to transfer e-
mails to the National Archives after spending more than $10 million to
locate 14 million e-mails reported missing four years ago from White
House computer files.

Civil division trial lawyer Helen H. Hong made the disclosure at a
court hearing provoked by a 2007 lawsuit filed by outside groups to
ensure that politically significant records created by the White House
are not destroyed or removed before President Bush leaves office at
noon on Tuesday. She said the department plans to argue in a court
filing this week that the administration's successful recent search
renders the lawsuit moot.

Hong's statement came hours after U.S. District Court Judge Henry H.
Kennedy Jr. ordered employees of the president's executive office --
with just days to go before their departure -- to undertake a
comprehensive search of computer workstations, preserve portable hard
drives and examine any e-mail archives created or retained from 2003
to 2005, the period in which e-mails appeared to be missing.

Hong said private contractors had helped find the e-mails by searching
through an estimated 60,000 tapes that contain daily recordings of the
entire contents of the White House computers as a precaution against
an electronic disaster.

Her remarks prompted Anne Weisman, the counsel for one of two
plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in
Washington (CREW), to say, "I'll believe it when I see it." Weisman
said she hoped the administration's efforts to recover the e-mails can
be verified by an independent expert, noting that officials have
repeatedly declined to detail the procedures they used. She also said
questions persist about whether backup tapes still existed for all of
the days for which e-mails were reported missing.

Meredith Fuchs, counsel for the other plaintiff, a historical group
known as the National Security Archive, said the Justice Department's
statement was "striking" because the admission that 14 million e-mails
had to be recovered showed "the level of mismanagement at the White
House" of its historically significant records. She said, "For the
past year and a half, they said, 'Don't worry, don't worry, leave us
alone.' Now they say, at the last minute, they have solved it. I want
to see the evidence."

Kennedy's order was the latest in a series of rulings about the fate
of Bush administration records that have been unfavorable to the White
House. Bush aides had long contended that the plaintiffs lacked
standing to sue, and they had resisted a court order requiring that
White House preserve the backup tapes that were used to recover the e-
mails; the courts rejected both positions.

Last week, a different judge overrode White House objections and
ordered the administration to search for information that CREW is
seeking on White House visitors during the Bush tenure. Another judge
turned aside White House objections to handing copies to aides of
President-elect Barack Obama of documents related to the controversial
firings of U.S. prosecutors in 2006, which Congress has demanded to
see. Still to be decided, possibly in coming days, is a lawsuit by
CREW demanding the preservation of vice presidential records that
aides to *** Cheney have said he alone can decide to withhold or
discard.

The dispute over recovery of the missing e-mails was provoked by the
disclosure four years ago that the White House, in switching to a new
internal e-mail system shortly after Bush's election, had abandoned an
automatic archiving system meant to preserve all messages containing
official business. Under the new system, any of the 3,000 or so
regular White House employees could access e-mail storage files,
enabling them to delete messages.

An internal White House report noted in 2005 that e-mails from
specific periods appeared to be missing, including key moments related
to the invasion of Iraq and to a federal probe of the leak of Valerie
Plame Wilson's classified employment with the CIA. White House
officials called that study flawed after congressional investigators
released it.

Once the e-mails are transferred to the National Archives, federal law
allows them to be requested under the Freedom of Information Act after
a five-year interval.

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