Paul Kiel April 12, 2007, 3:38 PM

From Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington:

In a startling new revelation, CREW has also learned through two confidential sources that the Executive Office of the President (EOP) has lost over five million emails generated between March 2003 and October 2005. The White House counsel’s office was advised of these problems in 2005 and CREW has been told that the White House was given a plan of action to recover these emails, but to date nothing has been done to rectify this significant loss of records.

To be clear: these are emails controlled by the White House — not emails on RNC servers, like those other lost emails.

When I spoke to CREW’s Naomi Seligman Steiner, she could only say that the missing emails were generated over a period of “hundreds of days within that two year period.” Furthermore, it’s not clear whose emails they are, or why those emails are missing as opposed to others. “We’re dealing with people who are only willing to tell us so much,” she said.

But apparently this issue came up in the course of Plame investigation. Among the exhibits attached to CREW’s new report, Without A Trace: The Missing White House Emails and the Violations of the Presidential Records, is a January 31, 2006 letter from Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to Scooter Libby’s lawyer about pre-trial discovery.

One of the final paragraphs of the seven-page letter reads:

We are aware of no evidence pertinent to the charges against defendant Libby which has been destroyed. In an abundance of caution, we advise you that we have learned that not all email of the Office of Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system.

I’m sure we’ll hear more about this.

Karl Rove, Presidential Records Act