New report details loss of Bush-era e-mails

[sabra]

Source: WP

Top aides to President George W. Bush seemed unconcerned amid multiple warnings as early as 2002 that the White House risked losing millions of e-mails that federal law required them to preserve, according to an extensive report obtained by The Federal Eye and set for release on Monday.

The report, by the nonprofit watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, follows a settlement reached last December between the Obama administration, CREW and the National Security Archive, a George Washington University research institute. The groups sued the Bush White House in 2007 alleging it violated federal law by not preserving millions of e-mails sent between 2003 and 2005.

The settlement resulted in the restoration of 94 days worth of e-mail and the release of documents detailing when the Bush White House learned of the missing e-mails and how it responded. The restored e-mails are part of the National Archives and Records Administration's historic record of the Bush administration, but presidential historians and others seeking information in the coming decades about the major decisions of Bush's presidency likely will be starved of key details, including messages sent between White House officials and drafts of final policy decisions, CREW said in its report (see it below).

"The net effect of this is we've probably lost some truly valuable records that would have provided insight," into the administration's decisionmaking process on several policy issues, said CREW Chief Counsel Anne L. Weismann, who led the review.

...

Missing e-mails included messages sent by the office of Vice President http://www.washingtonpost.com/cheney">Dick Cheney that were later sought by the Justice Department as part of its investigation into the disclosure of Valerie Plame's identity as a covert CIA spy and messages from the months preceding the start of the Iraq war.

Scott Stanzel, a former Bush spokesman, called CREW a liberal group that "likes to sue for sport and for years has tried to create a spooky conspiracy out of standard IT issues."

Read more: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2010/08/new_report_details_loss_of_bus.html?wprss=federal-eye&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

[alfredo]

1. How convenient

[ProgressiveProfessor]

2. What as the current administration done to insure this does not happen again?

[pattmarty]

3. That goddamn delete button, did it again!!!!

[molly77]

4. I miss having a Justice System in the US

[pattmarty]

5. Well there is a "legal" system (although I wouldn't call it Justice)..........

.........that is a three tiered system. You have the top tier of the wealthy who seldom if ever get hauled before the system and when they do they have the best system money can buy. Then you have the "main" part of the system, the one for the middle class (mostly) white citizens, and at the bottom you have our fantastic penal system for "all the (very many) rest".

[tularetom]

6. Do these people have pictures of Obama and Eric Holder with a goat?

WTF does it take for there to be consequences of this kind of shit?

There is no reason for any administration to clean up its snail trail and you can bet that the next republican administration that gets in will start deleting everything from day 1.

The Obama administration of course will play by the rules and preserve everyfuckingthing and will undoubtedly be continue to be hauled into court for the next 30 or 40 years over shit that various republican witch hunters find in those e-mails.

They just do not get it.

[gratuitous]

7. Yes, spooky conspiracies

Not like the grounded-in-nothin'-but-the-finest-reality suspicions of the birther gang.

Historians have "lost some truly valuable records that would have provided insight," but prosecutors have also lost some truly valuable evidence. Bush's top aides were unconcerned about it, because they knew the fix was already in, and they would never have to face even an investigation into their crimes, let alone anything so messy and inconvenient to their resumes as an indictment or a trial.

[louis-t]

10. "Provided insight"???

Provided evidence of criminal conspiracy.

[OnyxCollie]

8. The Bush administration took down

the automated record management system the Clinton administration had set up, allowing millions of emails to "disappear".

To use a corporate analogy, in agency theory this is the removal of an internal constraint (monitoring) used by principals (shareholders/constituents) to prevent agents (executives/politicians) from padding their income and excessively diversifying (profiteering/starting wars/outing spies/stealing elections/prosecuting Democrats/etc.)

[OnyxCollie]

9. K&R. nt

[Winterblues]

11. Didn't they use the RNC's data banks for their e-mail?

I seem to recall reading that at the time.. Ninty percent of their e-mail traffic was through the RNC and not Government servers.

[OnyxCollie]

12. They did.

It was a violation of the Presidential Records Act. They went around the WH servers by using RNC-issued Blackberries to do government business. Former RNC head Michael Duncan was subpoenaed to produce the tapes, but AFAIK, nothing ever came from it.

[valerief]

13. If this isn't a fascist state, I don't know what is. nt

[kpete]

14. Report: Warnings about e-mails went unheeded in Bush White House

Source: Washington Post

Report: Warnings about e-mails went unheeded in Bush White House

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 29, 2010; 8:06 PM

Top aides to President George W. Bush seemed unconcerned amid multiple warnings as early as 2002 that the White House risked losing millions of e-mails that federal law required them to preserve, according to an extensive review of records set for release Monday.

The review, conducted by the nonprofit watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, follows a settlement reached last December between President Obama's administration, CREW and the National Security Archive, a George Washington University research institute. The groups sued the Bush White House in 2007, alleging it violated federal law by not preserving millions of e-mails sent between 2003 and 2005.

The settlement resulted in the restoration of 94 days worth of e-mail and the release of documents detailing when the Bush White House learned of the missing e-mails and how it responded. The restored e-mails are part of the National Archives and Records Administration's historic record of the Bush administration, but presidential historians and others seeking information in the coming decades about the major decisions of Bush's presidency likely will be starved of key details, including messages sent between White House officials and drafts of final policy decisions, according to CREW.

"The net effect of this is we've probably lost some truly valuable records that would have provided insight" into the administration's decision-making process on several policy issues, said CREW Chief Counsel Anne L. Weismann, who led the review.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/29/AR2010082902931.html

---

CREW: BUSH WHITE HOUSE IGNORED WARNINGS ABOUT EMAIL
http://www.citizensforethics.org/bush-white-house-ignored-warnings-about-email

[SpiralHawk]

15. "Smirk." - xCommander AWOL (R)

[SpiralHawk]

16. "Sneer." - xVP Dickie 'Five-Military-Deferments' Cheney (R)

[FormerDittoHead]

17. "seemed unconcerned"... nice way to put it. I'd put it another way...

I would say:

"Failed to answer warnings due to the fact that they were engineering the loss from the top down."

[corpseratemedia]

22. yet another +1 FDH!

[skoalyman]

18. they probably didn't know what the heck an email was

:wow:

[jberryhill]

19. The WH was embarrassed about all that money W sent....

...to that nice widow-lady in Nigeria with all of that cash she needed help moving.

[pgodbold]

20. I'm an IT person and this thing about the WH emails is a real hot button for me. It kills me that

the Obama administration is giving them a free pass. I believe that part of Obama's legacy and historical record will be that he aided and abetted the crimes of the Bush administration by sweeping them under the rug.

[BootinUp]

23. When the executive branch gets out of control,

meaning at the highest level it is the responsibility of the Congress to do something about it. Thats just the way the government is set up. You will never see an administration go after a previous one trying to put them jail, or maybe more accurately, the odds are extremely long.

[pgodbold]

28. Thank you. nt

[boppers]

31. Can you recover every single email you've ever written or received?

Congrats if you can, with bonus points if that's over 20,000 messages a day... when the * people came in, they were still on a pretty bullet-proof (literally, shoot the motherboard, another box picks up in seconds with no data loss, VMS rocks) internal WH system, but their outside email accounts were still on crappy X86 Wintel systems.

No surprise that data loss happened, no surprise they didn't budget for better systems, no surprise that their IT sucked. From 9/11 to Katrina to Iraq to freaking email, the incompetence is breathtaking. Criminal? Maybe.

[Virginian]

21. They had to get rid of them...

Or else Scooter Libby couldn't take the fall for Cheney and have his sentence commuted so he wouldn't have to serve one minute.
I wonder what Susan McDougall and Martha Stewart think about Scooter getting off.

Susan was never convicted of anything, she was just locked up because she refused to say what Ken Starr wanted her to say. Failure to cooperate with the Independent Prosecutor. "Lock her up until she is ready to cooperate."

Martha was locked up for Lying to the investigator. She was declaring her innocence!
PS: She was NOT convicted of insider trading. She was found not guilty of that charge.

[Missy Vixen]

27. Those e-mails were the smoking gun

CREW worked with Patrick Fitzgerald's office to force recovery of them, especially when Gonzo refused to comply with a federal subpoena ordering an immediate lockdown of the White House's servers. It took 12 hours to comply. I wonder how many hard drives were "disappeared" or wiped in that amount of time...

The most compelling reason Libby's sentence was commuted was because outright pardoning him would mean he could not take the Fifth on the witness stand.

[Blue Owl]

24. "Indecision Point"

Now we just need some toothless Dems to downplay this and help the GOP flush it down the memory hole.

:sarcasm:

[flvegan]

25. Yeah, but Roger Clemens might have lied about using steroids in 2008.

He needs to be prosecuted. Priorities, people.

[Fearless]

26. Baseball Star Perjury > War Crimes

[hootinholler]

29. "valuable records that would have provided insight"

AKA Evidence.

:grr:

-Hoot

[boppers]

30. Hanlon's

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

If this was a conspiracy/cover-up of a competent sort, there would be *no* "missing" email. All of it would be accounted for (except the ones that magically never existed).

[OnyxCollie]

32. Are you saying the conspiracy was not competent

or are you denying the conspiracy completely?

Because if it's the latter, you're setting a new record for bullshit, boppers.