Judge gives White House a deadline on emails

This case seems to be a never-ending source of entertainment.

The White House has three days to explain why it shouldn’t be required to copy its computer hard drives to ensure no further e-mails are lost, a federal judge ordered Tuesday. Already, e-mails between March and October 2003 appear to have been lost, Judge John M. Facciola noted, because they were improperly archived and no backup copies exist. That period includes the U.S. invasion of Iraq. E-mails by White House staff are considered part of the nation’s historical record, and federal law requires they be preserved. The White House has admitted that potentially millions of e-mails from the past eight years have been erased, although it has provided conflicting accounts on how many may still exist on backup tapes. The order, issued Tuesday morning by a federal magistrate judge in Washington, D.C., comes in a case brought against the Bush administration by the National Security Archive, a nonpartisan group affiliated with George Washington University.

The National Security Archive apparently proposed, initially, that the White House be forced to quarantine every computer workstation it had to protect the data before staffers could “accidentally” delete more correspondence. The judge wouldn’t go for that, calling it “draconian.”

Instead, Facciola wants the White House to make a “forensic copy” of all preservable data on every computer that could have been used by an employee between 2003 and 2005 — and gave the Bush gang until Friday to explain why that isn’t a good idea.



And just to provide a little background and context — because, well, this story just fascinates me — I’d just remind readers that the Bush White House was directly responsible for creating a “primitive” email system that created a high risk that data would be lost.

Steven McDevitt’s written statements, placed on the public record at a congressional hearing, asserted that a study by White House technical staff in October 2005 turned up an estimated 1,000 days on which e-mail was missing. Two federal laws require electronic messages to be preserved. […] In his written statements, McDevitt said he participated in meetings with White House counsel Harriet Miers and members of her staff. The meetings, in December 2005 and early 2006, occurred around the time McDevitt and other technical staffers were trying to determine how much e-mail was missing from the White House. In a report presented at the hearing, Waxman’s Democratic staff said difficulties arose in recovering e-mails for Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald in the CIA leak probe. Fitzgerald publicly disclosed the fact that the White House had an e-mail problem in early 2006. There were no archived e-mails from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney from Sept. 30, 2003, to Oct. 6, 2003, just as the Justice Department was launching its investigation into whether anyone at the White House leaked Valerie Plame’s CIA identity, according to documents provided to the House panel. The only e-mails that could be recovered for prosecutors were from the personal e-mail accounts of officials in Cheney’s office, according to the report by Waxman’s staff. McDevitt’s statements detailed shortcomings that he said have plagued the White House e-mail system for six years. He declared that: * The White House had no complete inventory of e-mail files. * Until mid-2005 the e-mail system had serious security flaws, in which “everyone” on the White House computer network had access to e-mail. McDevitt wrote that the “potential impact” of the security flaw was that there was no way to verify that retained data had not been modified. * There was no automatic system to ensure that e-mails were archived and preserved.

Perhaps most startling of all, the Bush Administration managed to dismantle, apparently on purpose, the Clinton Administration’s email archive system — which worked just fine — without replacing it with anything at all.

These guys just amaze me.