White House records: Don't empty that (e-mail) recycle bin?

From Rose Mary Woods' tape recordings to Karl Rove's e-mails, congressional investigators and political historians are forever seeking records of White House communications, often against the wishes of the sitting president.

It was no different today as the Democratic-controlled House neared debate on imposing new rules on the preservation of e-mails from the White House and other federal agencies in defiance of a White House veto threat.

The action was in response to missing e-mails highlighted by congressional probes into whether aides to President Bush, including Rove, then the president's chief political strategist, used Republican National Committee e-mail accounts to conduct government business in an attempt to circumvent the Presidential Records Act, a post-Watergate law designed to preserve White House records.

Additionally, hundreds of days' worth of official White House e-mails sent and received from 2003 to 2005 are unaccounted for, according to a report by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, whose chairman, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills), has highlighted the issue. While the problems have been acute under the Bush administration, the report said, other administrations, including President Clinton's, have encountered problems preserving e-mail records.

The legislation, "the Electronic Message Preservation Act,'' would direct the Archivist of the United States to set rules for preservation of electronic records.

The White House, opposing the measure, said in a statement that it would "upset the delicate separation of powers balance" and "require the Archivist to intrude, in an excessive and inappropriate manner, into the activities of an incumbent President and his or her staff."

The administration also expressed concerns about the cost to taxpayers of preserving not only e-mails but potentially also "instant messaging, wikis, blogs" and other emerging technologies.

"E-mail transmission is the key method of communication in the modern government," said Julian E. Zelizer, a Princeton University history professor. "Unfortunately, we don't have as good a system to ensure that these e-mails are retained for citizens and historians. Without e-mail, understanding the total story of what happened will be much harder to piece together."

(He communicated his thoughts by e-mail.)

Republicans attempted to use the bill to portray Democrats' as focused on misguided priorities.

"Since we’re talking about e-mails, the number one message we’re getting back from our constituents is high energy prices," said Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.)

-- Richard Simon

Photo credit: Associated Press

Comments

[Jim]

Try Karl Rove for subversion and impeach George Bush for treason.
But arrest Dick Cheney for fraud and corruption first.

These three above all others are utterly contemptuous of the American democratic means of governance and need to be brought to justice as quickly as possible, preferably before January 09.

[Ray]

I and many other people worked on the email software used by the White House.

IT departments take into account failures in software and make daily, weekly and monthly backups.

On a given email server (several may be in operation depending upon how many users you have), if the information is important, you would use a Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) in a configuration such that the data would not be lost in the event of one or more disks failing.

With information that valuable, they would also use co-location - saving the data in at least two locations - in the event of a catastrophe at one location.

These procedures are not "onerous". They are used at companies around the world every day by businesses.

It is highly unlikely that any emails are actually missing. If they are missing, it is because someone intentionally destroyed them in the two different locations they would have been stored.

Interview the people who administer the email servers used by the White House.