Nick Juliano, Raw Story

The internal workings of the White House that caused it to lose perhaps millions of internal e-mails over several years is becoming clearer, but with that sharper focus comes diminishing hopes among Democrats and open-government activists that history will ever get the full picture of how the Bush administration operated.

At a Capitol Hill hearing yesterday, a former White House computer technician outlined the administration’s shortcomings in implementing a “primitive” e-mail archiving system that created a high risk the information would be lost.

Steven McDevitt, who worked for the administration from 2002 to 2006, also doubled previously reported estimates of the number of days of missing e-mails. Investigators for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee previously said e-mails were missing for 473 days; McDevit said in written testimony to the committee that the number was closer to 1,000 days. He also said at least 1 million e-mails were believed to have gone missing; activists have estimated the number of missing e-mails is closer to 10 million.

(Original Article)