Why is it taking White House officials so long to restore millions of deleted e-mails from the backup tapes they claim to have? The e-mails in question date from March 2003 to October 2005 – a crucial period that includes the Iraq invasion, a presidential election and Hurricane Katrina. White House officials have known for more than two years that the messages were deleted – a clear violation of presidential records-preservation statutes. But the president’s aides won’t explain what happened, what sort of backups they have and what they’re doing about it. That obstinacy led a federal judge to step in yesterday and order the White House to preserve every bit of related data in its possession – just to make sure nothing untoward happens while a civil suit by two open-government groups goes forward…
It is a remarkable thing when a judge feels compelled to order the White House to not destroy evidence in a trial, not destroy Presidential records which, by law, must be maintained…
"This information may also reveal the extent to which any of the defendants has already destroyed any back-up copies of the deleted email records or transferred them out of the OA’s possession, custody or control. Separate and apart from the illegality of any such action, it is critical to ascertain what back-up copies may have been destroyed to determine what additional steps can and should be taken to replicate those copies before the end of President Bush’s term in office. These other copies, however, whether in hard drives or other repositories, are only accessible for the duration of President Bush’s term, after which they will be cleaned out for the incoming president. Accordingly, it is critical to pinpoint what back-up copies are presently available and what back-up copies have been destroyed to explore, in the short time that remains, alternative methods of restoring the millions of deleted email records.
"Under this administration’s watch, millions of email have gone missing and the White House has done nothing to reconstruct those historically important federal records or take steps to prevent further document destruction. When confronted with requests for information about the missing email problem, the White House has unilaterally removed itself from the public arena altogether by declaring that the OA is no longer an agency subject to government sunshine laws. In the short life of this lawsuit the White House defendants have refused to give adequate assurances of document preservation, refused to provide basic information and refused to meet with plaintiff’s counsel to plan for discovery."
It is equally remarkable that the President and his staff, under oath to uphold the laws of the land, regularly ignore those very laws. When there’s a problem, they just carry on declaring the problem null and void, or ignore things altogether. Froomkin asks "Why is it taking so long?" as if there’s some presumption that the White House is actually doing anything. I expect the White House is doing nothing at all, and that the supposed emails are long gone into cyberspace. Froomkin forgets that we’re operating under the "right of kings," aka the unitary executive. But the disappearance of emails seems to have become an epidemic at the Palace:
And how did the public find out about the e-mails deleted off the White House servers? From CIA leak special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. In January 2006, after his indictment of vice presidential aide Scooter Libby for obstruction of justice and perjury, Fitzgerald sent a letter to Libby’s lawyer that understatedly noted that "we advise you that we have learned that not all e-mail of the Office of Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system."A lot of people seem confused about this, so it’s worth pointing out that there are two entirely different sets of missing e-mails: These and the ones that top White House aides including Karl Rove intentionally sent and received using their Republican National Committee e-mail accounts even while knowing full well that circumventing the White House servers for official business was a violation of federal law.
When congressional investigators looking into the suspicious firings of nine U.S. attorneys last year started asking after those e-mails, it turned out those were missing, too, just for different reasons: They’d been deleted by the RNC. The White House is ostensibly trying to recover those as well…
Why do we have to put up with this malarkey? They work for us – secrecy, interim appointments, signing statements, deliberate lies, deceit, destroyed records, government agencies as political party adjuncts, incompetence, irresponsibility. Why do we have to tolerate this? I guess it’s bad form to arrest a president, but we put Judith Miller in jail until she agreed to cooperate with the law. How about jailing some people in the White House? That’s what would happen to me if I behaved this way…
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