White House had daily audits of e-mails, which suggests missing e-mails were destroyed
Submitted by crew on 31 August 2007 - 9:21am. Bush Administration Without A Trace
Earlier this year, CREW broke the story that five million e-mails were missing from the White House system. We issued a report, Without A Trace, detailing the legal issues behind the story of the White House e-mail scandal. Even top Bush officials could not deny our findings. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), Chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has been investigating the missing e-mails. Yesterday, we learned that the White House conducted daily audits of its e-mail system. As CREW's Anne Weismann told Bloomberg News, that certainly suggests the e-mails weren't lost in a technical glitch:
The revelation that there were daily audits suggests that e-mails were destroyed, said Anne Weismann, general counsel of the nonprofit watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sued the Bush administration in May over the missing e-mails.
"It's hard to imagine it could have been a technical problem," Weismann said in an interview. It is "incomprehensible that e-mail could go missing and it not be caught."
http://www.citizensforethics.org/node/30025..................
Last month, the White House argued in federal court that its own Office of Administration was not subject to FOIA, even though the White House website said otherwise. The White House website has now been changed.
We noted two weeks ago that the Bush administration had refused a Freedom of Information Act request for records concerning the loss of millions of White House emails. Justice Department lawyers argued that the office which maintained that information, the Office of Administration, was not subject to FOIA.
But sometimes the administration surprises even itself with its capacity for secrecy. And so it was here, since the White House website clearly stated that the Office of Administration was subject to FOIA. And the office had been busily fulfilling FOIA requests for years, even employing a FOIA officer (the Department lawyers explained in their filing that this wasn't a problem). Here's the website as it was last month:
No more. Finally, the website has caught up, as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the D.C. watchdog that filed the FOIA request notes. Now it's:
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004063.php