The Obama White House has finally stopped defending the mess the Bush administration made of its email archiving, and has agreed to restore millions of missing e-mails from George W. Bush's presidency.
Mother Jones on Monday detailed the "years-long legal battle" that Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) and the National Security Archive (NSA) fought against the Bush administration over archiving problems that led to the loss of more than 20 million White House emails.
The Bush administration first ran into archiving problems in 2003 but didn't begin to address the problem until October 2005. CREW and NSA filed the lawsuit in order to "force the White House to recover missing emails and implement an effective archiving system that would prevent important presidential records from being lost or misplaced in the future."
After months of balking, the Obama administration reached a settlement with the plaintiffs, under which the White House must recover a total of 94 days of missing emails from 2003 to 2005, all of which will be transferred to the National Archives for preservation and eventual release.
But don't get too excited -- the e-mails could take years to become accessible to the public.
"The actual timeframe is not clear," said Melanie Sloan, CREW's executive director. "The emails could be released in 5, maybe 10 years under the Presidential Records Act."
In any case, the recovery of the emails will shed some light on why they went missing in the first place and why the Bush administration "knowingly continued to use a broken system for preserving electronic records," according to a CREW press release.
Norm Eisen, special counsel to the president for ethics and government reform, wrote in a White House blog post: "The President is firmly committed to ensuring that the records of this Administration--as well as those of all previous administrations--are properly retained and preserved. We are pleased to see this matter reach an amicable resolution."
During the Clinton administration, new servers were installed to archive all presidential email. News media reports indicated that the Bush administration intentionally disabled the system.
The Bush administration officials had been using a private Internet domain, called gwb43.com, owned by and hosted on an e-mail server run by the Republican National Committee, for various communications of unknown content or purpose.
The domain name is an acronym standing for "George W. Bush, 43rd" President of the United States. The server came public when it was discovered that J. Scott Jennings, the White House's deputy director of political affairs, was using a gwb43.com e-mail address to discuss the firing of the U.S. attorney for Arkansas.
Communications by federal employees were also found on georgewbush.com (registered to "Bush-Cheney '04, Inc.") and rnchq.org (registered to "Republican National Committee"), but, unlike these two servers, gwb43.com has no Web server connected to it — it is used only for e-mail.
The "gwb43.com" domain name was publicized by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), who sent a letter to Oversight and Government Reform Committee committee chairman Henry A. Waxman requesting an investigation.
Waxman sent a formal warning to the RNC, advising them to retain copies of all e-mails sent by White House employees. According to Waxman, "in some instances, White House officials were using nongovernmental accounts specifically to avoid creating a record of the communications."
The Republican National Committee claimed to have erased the emails, supposedly making them unavailable for Congressional investigators.
On April 12, 2007, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel stated that White House staffers were told to use RNC accounts to "err on the side of avoiding violations of the Hatch Act, but they should also retain that information so it can be reviewed for the Presidential Records Act," and that "some employees ... have communicated about official business on those political email accounts."
Stanzel also said that even though RNC policy since 2004 has been to retain all emails of White House staff with RNC accounts, the staffers had the ability to delete the email themselves.
Apprently Stanzel was wrong. Many of the emails have been recovered. As you will recall, Sarah Palin was using a similar subterfuge as the governor of Alaska. She was conducting official Alaska business using a private email accounts until a hacker broke in to one of her accounts.
This is another example of the creepy stuff Republicans do. They have no interest in government transparency or working in the sunshine.
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/14/missing-bush-e-mails-rest_n_391717.html
source: Wikipedia
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