Congress to Bush: You've Lost Mail

From the House report: "The difficulties the White House encountered in recovering e-mails for Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald . . . undermine its claim that the journaling system was adequate. According to documents provided and shown to the Committee, the journaling archive system contained no e-mails from the Office of the Vice President for important dates: September 30, 2003, to October 6,2003.

"In an effort to recover the e-mails, the White House restored backup tapes for these days. These backup tapes also contained no journaled e-mails or .pst files for those dates for the Office of the Vice President. The only e-mails that could be recovered and provided to the Special Counsel were e-mails that the White House was able to restore from the personal email accounts of officials in the Vice President's office."

The White House team eventually "recovered 17,956 e-mails from these individual mailboxes on the backup tape and used these as their basis to search for e-mails responsive to the Special Counsel's request," the report says.

But consider this fact: "A restoration of personal mailboxes from a backup tape does not recover any e-mails deleted by the user before the backup tape was made."

The backup tape the White House used to restore the e-mails was a snapshot taken fully two weeks after the gap in question.

Also consider that according to Steven McDevitt, a former White House computer technician, until mid-2005 "the file servers and the file directories used to store the retained email . . . were accessible by everyone on the EOP network." McDevitt said the "potential impact" of this security flaw was that there was "[n]o verification that data retained has not been modified."

Here are the written responses from McDevitt to questions from the committee, and a series of other supporting documents provided to the committee by the White House and the archives.

Here are the prepared texts of opening statements by Alan R. Swendiman, director of the Office of Administration, Theresa Payton, the White House's chief information officer, and Allen Weinstein, the archivist of the United States.

Blogger emptywheel liveblogged the contentious hearing.

The Coverage

Dan Eggen writes in The Washington Post: "After promising last year to search its computers for tens of thousands of e-mails sent by White House officials, the Republican National Committee has informed a House committee that it no longer plans to retrieve the communications by restoring computer backup tapes, the panel's chairman said yesterday.

"The move increases the likelihood that an untold number of RNC e-mails dealing with official White House business during the first term of the Bush administration -- including many sent or received by former presidential adviser Karl Rove -- will never be recovered, said House Democrats and public records advocates.

"The RNC had previously told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that it was attempting to restore e-mails from 2001 to 2003, when the RNC had a policy of purging all e-mails, including those to and from White House officials, after 30 days. But Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) disclosed during a hearing yesterday that the RNC has now said it 'has no intention of trying to restore the missing White House e-mails.'