Here's a bombshell for you, Paul:

Cunningham briber Mitch Wade's MZM somehow connected to White House e-mail?

Remember MZM, the government body shop whose founder and CEO Mitchell Wade was charged as a co-conspirator in the Duke Cunningham bribery scandal? Well, MZM is among the handful of contractors identified in writing by a White House technology official at a Waxman hearing today as having been hired to deal with White House email - millions of which have gone missing. See page 4/question 5 of thie questionnaire (.pdf) filled out by Mr. Steve McDevitt, a senior manager in office of the chief information office of the Executive Office of the President administration office from 2002 through 2006.

Article is here.
Questionnaire here.

Remember it was MZM that landed a curious contract for "furtniture" at the White House in 2002 for $140,000. MZM, an intelligence services company, never had a federal contract before that one.

And it was in 2002 that the White House inexplicably turned off the Clinton-era automatic e-mail archiving system. And replaced it with nothing.

Someone had to turn it off. MZM?

The shared information fails to explain why the original data, in the original format before transfer/migration, is not available.

7 of 26: The plan did not include destroying data before it has been saved to a backup loaction [text added]: "The iniital email retention process involved a manual process of copying messages [not destroying, not reformatting] from the Exchange journals to .pst files for storage and retention."

Refs
5 of 26: "Detailed plans were created to support this migration." These plans were started well before the migration in 2002; yet, we're in 2008, and they're still attempting to "figure" this out. This does not address the question: Where are the original files? They were not destroyed, but copied.

- Are we to believe that the EOP, without outside questions by the court, would not have taken any effort to understand why the data was getting lost?

7 of 26: Note, the automated systems didn't write over, but copied:

"The Mail Attender utility was used to automatically copy email message from the journals to the .pst files on a regular basis."

- What happened to the original journals; why aren't they available for review?

12 of 26 focuses on the .pst files, not the orignal files. What happened to the originals? It doesn't matter that there was "confusion" about what was going on with the .pst. Thats unrelated to the original data sources.

13 of 26, question 18: Note, when responding to the questions about the interim actions, they avoid the original journal files.

- Why wasn't there any mention of the journal failes in this list on page 13?
- Are we to believe that the journal files -- the original ones -- were never touched, and there was no problem?
- Where are these journal files?
- Where were the journal files during this analysis, and discussed on page 13?

See page 7 of 26, question 10:

"I also did not have any operational responsibility for the archiving of the mail in either the Notes or Exchange environments."- Who did have the job/responsibility to safeguard the original journal files, not the .pst files, regardless whether they were or were not transferred/migrated from/to any format?

There are some spelling errors in the responses provided to Congress:

14 of 26: "It took a couple week" could be "It took a couple of weeks" or "It took a complete week"

14 of 26: "An independent verification and validation was also perform" could be "An independent verification and validation was also
performed"

- Which?

Issue: Sometimes if someone is rushed, they'll miss things. Suggests this person providing responses to Congress is working alone.

18 of 26: Disclosures that by-name WH counsel attended specific meetings. Issue isn't the content, but that there's a specific meeting that the WH counsel was there.

They cannot claim "privilege" on these meetings now that they're disclosed.

- Where is Fielding on this?
- Where is Miers in responding to this disclosed conversation?

18 of 26: More disclosures of WH Counsel involvement:

Outside of OA, there were other meetings with the purpose of presenting these issues to White House Management and White House Counsel and their staff.

- WH counsel and their staff were involved!

Cannot claim privildge on the meetings now that this meeting has been disclosed, and details of that meeting provided.

- What were the specific staff concerns about this "planned effort" to 'fully comply' with the "records retention act"?

- How can any of the WH counsel say, "The President doens't have to comply," yet the record shows the WH counsel was involved?

- Why bother having WH counsel involved with somethign that "doesn't fall under" the records act?

If the law, as the EOP/OVP wants us to believe, "didn't apply," then there whould have been no reason for WH counsel to instent upon, an dbe present during any of these planning actions. None.

32 CFR 2800

Take a look at 32 CFR 2800. The fact that WH counsel was present at these meetings destroys Addington's last credibiltiy in avoiding OVP compliance in re OVP Office Security Compilance requirements.

POW Working Group Meetings

The same issue occurred with the POW working group meetings: Same players were involved with meetings on the POWs, but they feigned ignorance later. WH counsel, OVP, and DOJ cannot argue, "We had no idea about these records," when they were involved with the meetings: Rendition, POW abuse. This looks like WH Counsel should have known that the records, as they allegedly related to war crimes evidence, was not meeting either the US requirements or Geneva obligations.

This is a COVER STORY put forth to show how they just didn't have a very good email system, damn those problems.

The Cover Story is to provide a logical reason for the 10 million destroyed emails.

They destroyed evidence, a violation of record keeping laws... and this well planted story is their way out of that violation of federal law.

Aw gee did we forget to archive?

Keep those "perception management" stories flowing....

Just like those 18,000 missing votes -- we just didn't have a couple of procedures in place... damn... sorry bout that...

CROCK OF S**T

Here's the hypothetical I need an answer to, because I'm not too keen on computer science:

Karl Rove did use gwb43.com for official e-mails to evade the archives and the .gov email system. If a site were to have shared the same IP address as one another, is it possible for them to have been able to gain access to the gwb43.com e-mail system and snoop around?

What a load of crap! "Primitive" email system. Ever hear of Microsoft Outlook?

Look, if these are the same guys that can hook up a machine in a room and vacuum up EVERY bit of information on the internet, then hold that information for later data mining, then why in the world would be believe they could NOT monitor the email coming in and out of their building....UNLESS THEY DID NOT WANT TOO.

Doesn't pass the smell test.

I christened this "The Incompetence Theory". When people are SOOO incompetent, at some point you have to realize they are not incompetent, but doing exactly what they want to do.....

This pdf is a post-changeover sales pitch for the micrsoftafcation of the white house systems.

This guy is the shill. He was hired to know nothing about the change over that was decided by Rove and company 2 years prior.

No mention of contracts with microsoft or RIM yet to start to convert the email system they needed a server with licensed windows server, MS Exchange and a RIM contract.

The first 2 years i believe were contracted out to RNC shell companies.