WHITE HOUSE FILING IN CREW LAWSUIT ADMITS TO DESTROYING BACK-UP COPIES OF EMAILS

16 Jan 2008 // Missing Emails Cover Start of Iraq War, Leaking of Valerie Wilson's Identity and Subsequent Justice Dept. Probe

*Click here to view previous White House statements that conflict with yesterday's filing*

Yesterday’s midnight filing by the White House in CREW v. Executive Office of the President, a lawsuit challenging the failure of the White House to preserve and restore millions of missing emails, raises some very troubling questions that the White House clearly does not want to answer.

The White House has now admitted that it does not have an effective system for storing and preserving emails. This is no mere technicality; it is this failure that led to the likely destruction of over 10 million email. What the White House has not explained is why it abandoned the electronic record-keeping system used by the prior administration -- a system that properly preserved White House email -- but did not replace it with another effective and appropriate system.

The White House has also admitted that the only safeguard it has to its patently inadequate method for preserving email (dumping them in files that are put on EOP servers) is back-up tape media. These back-up copies, however, are only a “snapshot” of what was on the server at the time of the back-up. In other words they are not comprehensive, as the White House concedes.

Even more troubling, the White House has now admitted that until October 2003, the White House recycled its back-up tapes, which contained the only copies of emails deleted prior to that date. What the White House has not explained is why it changed its policy of preserving all back-up tapes -- instituted in March of 2000 when the Clinton administration discovered that its system did not fully preserve all email from the Office of the Vice President -- at the same time it decided to dismantle the existing electronic record-keeping system, with no replacement at hand.

The deletion of millions of email beginning in March 2003 coupled with the White House’s destruction of back-up copies of those deleted email mean that there are no back-up copies of emails deleted during the period March 2003 through October 2003. The significance of this time-period cannot be overstated: the U.S. went to war with Iraq, top White House officials leaked the covert identity of Valerie Plame Wilson and the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into their actions.

The White House now claims there is a lack of documentation supporting both the fact that email are missing and the volume of missing email. Yet in January 2006, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, in a letter to Scooter Libby’s lawyers, stated unequivocally: “We have learned that not all email of the Office of Vice President and the Executive Office of President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system.” Moreover, when the problem was uncovered the White House Office of Administration created abundant documentation that included multiple estimates of the volume of missing email, not a single chart that the White House now suggests is the only documentation. Could it be that having now destroyed the evidence documenting the missing email problem, the White House feels free to retreat from its acknowledgment to Mr. Fitzgerald that White House emails are missing?

Also missing from the White House’s latest explanation of the missing email is why, more than two years after it discovered the problem, the White House still cannot say what happened, why it happened and how many email were affected. And the White House has yet to offer an explanation for why it never acted to recover any of the missing emails, even when presented with a recovery plan by its own Office of Administration.

It is perfectly clear why the White House has used every strategic maneuver it can think of to avoid answering any questions about the missing email: its answers are likely to raise more questions than they answer. That, years after the problem was discovered, the White House is still questioning whether or not there is even a problem is deeply disturbing.

Anne Weismann, chief counsel to CREW, said today, “With this new filing, the White House has admitted that although it has long known about the missing emails, it did nothing to recover them, or discover how and why they went missing in the first place. The missing emails are important historical records that belong not to the Bush administration, but to the American people. As a result, the public deserves a full accounting and hopefully, now that the matter is before a federal court, we will get one.”

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Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is a non-profit legal watchdog group dedicated to holding public officials accountable for their actions.

For more information, please visit www.citizensforethics.org or contact Naomi Seligman Steiner at 202.408.5565/nseligman@citizensforethics.org.

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Previous White House statements on missing emails:

January 23, 2006 Letter from Patrick Fitzgerald

Video of April 13, 2007 White House Press briefing with Dana Perino

Transcript of April 13, 2007 White House Press Briefing with Dana Perino

CNN story from April 13, 2007 on missing White House emails

December 20, 2007 Letter from Rep. Henry Waxman to White House Counsel

Partial transcript of January 17, 2008 White House press briefing with Tony Fratto:

QUESTION: Could you address the missing White House e-mails in the lawsuit that was a subject of reports this morning?

Are, in fact, the e-mails missing? What's the likelihood of their recovery?

FRATTO: I think our review of this -- and you saw the court filing on this and our declaration and response to the judge's questions. I think, to the best of what all the analysis we've been able to do, we have absolutely no reason to believe that any e-mails are missing.

There's no evidence of that. There's no -- we tried to reconstruct some of the work that went into a chart that was entered into court records, and could not replicate that, or could not authenticate the correctness of the data in that chart.

And from everything that we can tell, our analysis of our back-up systems, we just -- we have no reason to believe that any e-mail, at all, are missing.

QUESTION: So where are they, or what...

FRATTO: Where or what?

QUESTION: Where are they?

(LAUGHTER)

FRATTO: Which e-mail?

(CROSSTALK)

FRATTO: No one will tell you, categorically, about any system -- any system, whether it's, you know, your system at Bloomberg or our system here at the White House, past and present, categorically, that data cannot be missing.

But all of our review of it and all of our understanding of the way that the backup system works, it's a backup system that captures existing data; it captures things that are stored and archived.

We have no reason to believe that there is any data missing at all. And we've certainly found no evidence of any data missing.

QUESTION: So that would mean that, if you were asked, you would be in a position to comply with a request to produce those documents?

FRATTO: Yes, which documents?

I mean, if someone has a specific requests for documents, and they would like us to search for them...

QUESTION: E-mails, that is.

FRATTO: ... particular e-mails -- of course, we could search for e-mails, and we have. And we have been responsive to requests, in the past.

QUESTION: And they have been produced? They do exist?

FRATTO: We have produced e-mails, upon request, either for our own internal review or, sometimes, in response to investigations that have taken place on the Hill. I mean, we have been able to go back and find e-mail.

The question is, have we been able to find a large mass of missing e-mail? No. We have not located, somewhere in the system, the absence of something. We have not been able to note the absence of anything in our databases.

QUESTION: You're saying they're there; you just haven't located them yet?

FRATTO: No.

(CROSSTALK)

FRATTO: I'm saying we have no evidence that shows that anything, at all, is missing. And you're saying, well, have you found the missing e-mails?

And we say, we have no evidence that anything is missing.

QUESTION: So you're saying that would include e-mails that were erased from the Republican National Committee system that was used by some White House officials?

FRATTO: I can't speak to the RNC's -- the RNC's system of archiving and storing e-mail. All I can tell you is that e-mail on the White House computers, we have no reason to believe that any e- mail or other data are missing.

QUESTION: I want to follow up on that. I've taken a real sky view of this particular story, but -- so it was wrong to say a few months ago that there were possibly millions of e-mails missing?

FRATTO: I think those charges came from outside the White House. I think that's the charge of one of the...

QUESTION: One of your colleagues addressed those from the podium and suggested that that was accurate? Again, I'm taking...

FRATTO: I'm not sure what was said on that. I could tell you today, though, that we have no evidence and we have no way of showing that any e-mail at all are missing.