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Big Surprise: Bush Administration Claims On Missing Emails Likely Overstated

Yesterday, the Washington Post reported the claim by a Justice Department lawyer that the White House had, at the eleventh hour, found the famous "missing emails" which for four years it's been claiming that the dog ate -- I mean, that it lost when switching to a new email system after President Bush's re-election.

But it sounds like the Post was overly sanguine about the situation. In reality, the government's claim on behalf of the White House may not be worth much at all.

"It's definitely questionable that they're doing something to solve the problem," Meredith Fuchs, a lawyer for the National Security Archive, one of the groups suing to require the White House to recover the emails, told TPMmuckraker.

The emails at issue are from periods that will be crucial in assessing the Bush legacy, including the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and Pat Fitzgerald's probe of the Valerie plame leak. We'll know more about just how much has been preserved by next Tuesday or Wednesday, when the records will be transferred to the National Archives.

But it doesn't sound like we'll get everything. The new email system that the White House switched to four years ago allowed all staff members to access storage files and delete messages -- unlike the previous system, which was designed to preserve all messages containing official business. Fuchs said that the White House has still declined to make a forensic copy of the records, so any emails that were deleted likely won't be recovered. And since we're talking about millions of emails, it may be impossible to know what we don't have.

"They wait until the last moment and then they try to slam the door," Fuchs added.

Earlier this year, CREW, which is also bringing the suit, asked the FBI to probe whether the deletions of the emails had deliberate, and criminally. But there's no evidence the bureau followed up.

A fittingly disturbing coda to eight years of secrecy and obfuscation.


7 Comments

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I think they've been having a squad of IT/political hacks combing through them and trimming the emails that would lead to prosecution. But now they're leaving a large body of relatively nonactionable emails so they can argue that there's no reason to search further. Given the magnitude of the data, they wanted as much time as possible to cover their tracks. I doubt they let any archivist close to the computers while they were carefully "retrieving and preserving" the data.

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I was driving past the White House 3 months ago and I saw Ollie North and Fawn Hall pushing North's shredding machine through the front door.

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You too? I thought I was the only witness and I have been trying to sell my story. Hope the National Enquirer does not pick up your post.

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"whether the deletions of the emails had deliberate,"

Deliberate what?

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Personally I think it is very fitting that the Bush administration will fade into the fog of history clouded by yet more questions as to its legality. Historians and other academicians will spend many hours arguing about the content of the missing emails and what might have been proven. How can we deny them the right to do so by recovering all those communiques? Besides, if we look too hard and discover that these people were really just a bunch of jerks and not the evil doers we believe them to be, then the responsibility for the past eight years will be ours and not theirs.

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The Mishider and thief wants us to take his word?

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I'm surprised that after 8 years of the Bush/Cheney gang there are still some who refuse to recognize how devious this gang is.

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