White House Missing Five Million Emails

The White House "lost" roughly five million emails from 2003 to 2005, according to a report (.pdf) yesterday by watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

The report relies on two unnamed sources to arrive at the estimated figure, which refers to emails on White House servers. The Bush administration has already fessed up to losing emails about key political deliberations that took place on outside accounts. Critics believe outside emails were used to avoid scrutiny and an obvious paper trail in discussing the firings of eight U.S. Attorneys.

CREW says that Bush did away with a key piece of technology Clinton used to preserve internal emails. Called the Automated Records Management System (ARMS), it automatically stores all correspondence.Even so, some 246,000 Clinton emails were lost. This snafu gave the current administration an excuse to discontinue ARMS and, in 2006, kill a project designed to replace it, leaving behind a storage system that looked positively stone-age, according to the report:

"The only email retention process in use by the White House consists of extracting email messages from the email system and saving them in large, undifferentiated files on a file server."

The Bush administration apparently knew the system was flawed but did nothing. End result: five million emails lost. According to CREW, this is a massive violation of the Presidential Records Act, which requires the president to preserve records of all "activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies." The law was put in place in 1978 after a battle with Nixon over keeping records.

No surprise, then, that Democrats raised the Tricky Dicky specter this week. Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vermont) said the incident reminded him of "the famous 18-minute gap" in the Nixon White House tapes concerning Watergate. In an fiery speech to the Senate yesterday, Leahy also argued that records of the emails still exist on hard drives and servers. Here's the latest.

CREW puts it best in the conclusion of its report:

"The mounting evidence points [to] a disturbing picture of an administration wilfully ignoring, if not outright flouting, its record keeping obligations under the PRA. These actions are part of a larger administration effort to expand executive power and maintain high levels of secrecy....By destroying presidential records, this administration is also thwarting the ability of Congress and the courts to effectively oversee its actions, and the ability of the public to hold the administration fully accountable."

Photo: Rufino Uribe