White House tape recycling issues
WASHINGTON (AP) - January 16, 2008 The disclosure came minutes before midnight Tuesday under a
court-ordered deadline that forced the White House to reveal
information it has previously refused to provide.
Among the e-mails that could be lost are messages swapped by any
White House officials involved in discussions about leaking a CIA
officer's identity to reporters.
Before October 2003, the White House recycled its backup tapes
"consistent with industry best practices," according to a sworn
statement by a White House aide.
Backup tapes are the last line of defense for saving electronic
records.
Separately, the statement reveals the extent to which the White
House is apparently unable to answer how many e-mails are missing
from White House servers.
The White House "does not know if any e-mails were not properly
preserved in the archiving process," said the statement by Theresa
Payton, chief information officer for the White House Office of
Administration. "We are continuing our efforts," said Payton,
whose staff is responsible for the White House e-mail system.
If the e-mails were not saved, the White House might have
violated two laws requiring preservation of documents that fall
into the categories of federal records or presidential records.
White House spokesman Tony Fratto declined immediate comment
Wednesday.
The seven-page document filed in U.S. District Court says the
White House in October 2003 "began preserving and storing all
backup tapes and continues to do so." Payton said this means that
e-mails sent or received in the 2003-2005 time period should be
contained on existing backup tapes.
The period of 2003 and 2005 is the time frame at issue in
lawsuits seeking information about possibly millions of missing
e-mails at the Bush White House.
Payton's sworn statement was filed in response to a federal
court order last week in lawsuits by two private groups, Citizens
for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National
Security Archive.
The lawsuits allege that millions of e-mails are missing from
White House servers. The recycling of backup tapes leaves doubt
whether any missing e-mails will be recoverable.
"If the backup tapes have been erased or taped over or
recycled, it's hard to imagine where we will find copies of many
lost e-mails," said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel to the
National Security Archive, said in an interview Wednesday.
"It appears that the White House has now destroyed the evidence
of its misconduct," said Anne Weismann, the chief counsel for the
ethics group.
"The White House declaration raises more questions than it
answers, specifically the likelihood that for a very significant
period of time - March 2003 to October 2003 - the White House
recycled its backup tapes," said Weismann.
"As a result there may be no way to recover the missing e-mails
from a period in which the U.S. decided to go to war with Iraq,
White House officials leaked the identity of Valerie Plame and the
Justice Department started a criminal investigation of the White
House," the lawyer said.
The sworn statement by Payton did not say how early in the Bush
administration the recycling of backup computer tapes began. The
statement does not say why the White House stopped recycling backup
tapes in October 2003.
In the period of July until October of 2003, the White House was
dealing with the Valerie Plame leak controversy. In July, at least
three presidential aides leaked Plame's CIA identity to the news
media after her husband suggested the administration had
manipulated intelligence in the run-up to the war in Iraq. The
Justice Department began investigating the leak in September 2003.
In January 2006, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald said that
not all White House e-mail had been saved through the normal
archiving process.
