WHITE HOUSE CHANGES ITS STORY -- FOR THE FIRST TIME DENIES EMAILS ARE MISSING

17 Jan 2008 // Earlier today, White House spokesperson Tony Fratto stated:

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.

In contrast:

On April 13, 2007, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino admitted that there were email missing from between March 2003 and October 2005. Ms. Perino stated:

“What we have done is come forward to talk about the small slice of universe -- small slice of the universe of the emails that we've identified that have the potential to possibly not be there. And, again, I think that one of the things that's difficult is the things that we don't know. We don't know them, but we're trying to find them out. And there are ways that you can retrieve any emails that are potentially lost.”

In a December 20, 2007 letter to White House Counsel Fred Fielding, Government Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman said:

“in briefings with White House officials, Committee staff have been informed that during a 2005 review of White House servers, the White House found numerous days with few or no e-mails for certain White House components.”

Finally, in a January 23, 2006 letter former Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald stated:

“ . . . we have learned that not all email of the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the White House email archiving process on the White House computer system.”