Bush E-Mails May Be Secret a Bit Longer

Stanzel said the White House is also still "working to acquire" e-mails involving official government business that were transmitted by presidential aides through accounts operated by the Republican National Committee, a problem also first publicized almost three years ago. "We continue to be in communication with RNC officials about recovering official records," he said without offering details. Such records are subject to the Presidential Records Act, which requires their transfer to the Archives at noon on Jan. 20.

Thomas S. Blanton, the National Security Archive director, said controversy surrounding the last-minute handling of e-mails by retiring presidents -- including intervention by the courts -- is hardly exceptional.

Blanton wrote in a 1995 book that Ronald Reagan tried to order the erasure of all electronic backup tapes during his final week in office; the current president's father struck a secret deal with the U.S. archivist shortly before midnight on his final day in office to seal White House e-mails and take them with him to Texas; and Clinton asserted in 1994 that the National Security Council was not an agency of the government so he could keep its e-mails beyond public reach.

Blanton said last week that "the situation is exponentially worse" under the current administration because the volume of electronic records at stake from Bush's tenure is higher than in previous administrations. If some of the records are manipulated, even for a short while, he said, "the problem and the cost to the taxpayers is going to be exponentially worse, [as well as] the delay and the lag time before journalists and historians are going to be able to see this."

The transfer of some White House records officially got under way a few weeks ago with the first air shipments of documents to a leased warehouse north of Dallas, near the projected site of the Bush library, and the transport by truck of some digital records to a remote Navy research center in the mountains of West Virginia. The bullhorn used by Bush at the World Trade Center site in New York is among the objects set to go to Texas.

At the Navy base, all the electronic data are supposed to be "ingested" by a new electronic system meant to allow such efficient cataloguing, indexing and searching that millions of documents can eventually be provided to researchers and citizens online.

The system, which has been under development for a decade by Lockheed Martin and other contractors at a cost of $67.5 million, will rely on software created after the collapse of Enron, when that company's creditors demanded new tools for quickly sorting its e-mail trove to find damaging information.

But there are obstacles to gaining such ready access to files created by Bush and his appointees. Technical troubles, cost overruns and inadequate funding caused the system to be sharply scaled back at the outset, according to Archives officials and the Government Accountability Office. The result is that it will take years of work -- and an additional $70 million -- to put in place the features that the Archives initially sought.

"The ingestion of Bush data has just begun," said Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper, adding that she is unsure how smoothly it has gone.

The Archives hopes to finish much of its work on the new archival system by 2013, when by law the Bush White House records can begin to be accessed under the Freedom of Information Act.

But Archivist Allen Weinstein and other officials say they may still face a serious shortage of trained staff: Out of the Archives' 3,000 employees at 40 facilities, only a few are assigned to process requests by historians, citizens and others -- 10 at the Reagan library, eight at the first Bush library and 10 at the Clinton library.

The result has been a steady growth in delays for processing data requests, from a wait of a year and a half in 2001 at the Reagan library to a current wait of six and a half years. The new Bush library is slated to have 18 archivists.

"I tried -- half-whimsically -- to ban the word 'backlog' in favor of discussing NARA's 'surplus' of documents, which sounds better but which remains today an intractable problem," Weinstein said in a recent speech.