Congress to Bush: You've Lost Mail

"'The result is a potentially enormous gap in the historical record,' Waxman said, including the buildup to the Iraq war. . . .

"Administration officials have acknowledged that Rove and many other White House officials routinely used RNC accounts for government business, despite rules requiring that they conduct such business through official communications channels. The RNC deleted all e-mails until 2004, when it exempted White House officials from its e-mail purging policy.

"About 80 White House aides used RNC accounts for official government business, committee staff members said. Rove, for example, sent or received 140,000 e-mails on RNC servers from 2002 to 2007, and more than half involved official '.gov' accounts, the panel has said."

Pete Yost writes for the Associated Press: "A computer expert who worked at the White House provided the first inside look at its e-mail system Tuesday, calling it a 'primitive' setup that created a high risk that data would be lost.

"Steven McDevitt's written statements, placed on the public record at a congressional hearing, asserted that a study by White House technical staff in October 2005 turned up an estimated 1,000 days on which e-mail was missing. . . .

"[T]he White House defended the Bush administration's handling of its electronic messages.

"'We are very energized about getting to the bottom of this,' testified Theresa Payton, chief information officer at the White House Office of Administration.

"'This is a form of sandbagging,' replied Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who pointed out that by the time the White House fixes its e-mail problems, 'you'll be out of office.'"

Daniel Schulman blogs for Mother Jones: "Since as early as 2004, the National Archives has warned the White House that its system for preserving email records was inadequate -- and that some of those emails may not have been archived at all, but the Bush administration has been slow to remedy the problem."

Roy Mark of eWeek called yesterday hearing a "partisan political catfight."

And indeed, as Alexis Fabbri writes for the Washington Internet Daily, "members clashed along party lines over whether the National Archives can or should be able to get e-mails from top White House officials, including Karl Rove, who as presidential staff chief used Republican National Committee e-mail accounts for official business. . . .

"Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., . . . asked Weinstein if the Archive is 'keeping YouTube stuff on the president, things that show up on the Internet?' Issa didn't let Weinstein answer. Waxman 'thinks that he should have Karl Rove's every thinking . . . like a peeping tom,' Issa said. 'Do you capture every utterance of the president?' The archivist indicated that the answer was 'No.' It's 'very clear' that the RNC e-mails cover Rove's 'non-official activities . . . related to fundraising . . . maybe strategizing how the party could have kept the majority,' Issa said. It wouldn't be fair to make the Committee cover a costly recovery effort with its funds. 'The Chairman clearly wants to know what Karl Rove did . . . even if it wasn't official business,' he said. . . .