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CREW: Millions More Missing White House Emails
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.
Comments (73)
Rusty wrote on April 12, 2007 3:47 PM:Unbelievable, just f*&^$#g unbelievable.
Anonymous wrote on April 12, 2007 3:47 PM:Let's not fixate on the number 5 million.
Although this number is being quoted from confidential sources, anything White House related tends to be spun hard.
A White House described "handful" of e-mail accounts for the RNC turned out to be between 22-50.
I can only wonder if 5 million might instead be 50 million...
parrot wrote on April 12, 2007 3:55 PM:Sounds like...treason.
Code word: foot as in boot.
greg wrote on April 12, 2007 4:01 PM:Hey, mistakes were made. 5 mill, 10 mill, 20 million lost emails. Just a mistake, see? We tried to keep from losing them, and that oughta count for something, right?
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. wrote on April 12, 2007 4:01 PM:"George Bush is so dumb i wouldn't be surprised if he thought Peter Pan was a wash basin in a whore house"
9*16*05
Joe wrote on April 12, 2007 4:07 PM:They learned from Nixon's mistakes.
Punchy wrote on April 12, 2007 4:08 PM:1)Erase the tapes
2)Deny, deny, deny
TPM owes me a new Outrage Meter. You've finally broken it with this story. It red-lined several times with PurgeGate, but this just threw the needle off machine altogether.
Tom wrote on April 12, 2007 4:09 PM:"George Bush is so dumb i wouldn't be surprised if he thought Peter Pan was a wash basin in a whore house"
9*16*05
Posted by: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
And so it goes....
daCascadian wrote on April 12, 2007 4:10 PM:Time for some chats with the folks at the NSA it appears. Maybe even with some foreign intelligence agencies such as those in Australia, NZ, UK & possibly France.
Remember Echeleon ?
code = where (as in where to look next)
"Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable" - John F. Kennedy
Thucydides Jr. wrote on April 12, 2007 4:11 PM:Christ on a bicycle. These guys are like the alien in Carpenters "The Thing". They do not stop. This is about personal responsibility. And I say one of them is gonna have to be publicly and legally held responsible before ANY of them stop these shenanigans.
You, I used to play board games with guys like these. They used every jink, every vagary, every hole to push through what they wanted to do. And they knew in the end there was no enforcement.
I stopped playing with such folks back then, but these guys own the board. You can't walk away from them. You have to incarcerate them. and take their money and damn blackberries too.
jak1 wrote on April 12, 2007 4:12 PM:Looks like it's dangerous at the top. Guys like Rove SHOULD be concerned, but we know nothing will ever come of it.
The Dog ate my email. It's time to hold them to their standards, when an excuse like that is given. Think of the precedent this will set.
Hey if the White House can use it as an excuse, then why can't all americans?
EH wrote on April 12, 2007 4:15 PM:The number is not "millions," the number is "we lost as many as we're going to need to lose."
workaday joe wrote on April 12, 2007 4:16 PM:Paul Kiel says, "I'm sure we'll hear more about this."
Well, that's because you work in the reality-based world. Seems like this issue was already raised by Fitzgerald but to no avail. I think we have to concede that circumstances (and laws) will not change the behavior of this administration and that Bush and his inner circle are probably safe. So the question is, how can we make the most of this?
Maybe congress will pass another law that will be craftily broken 20 years from now when we're bogged down in a meaningless war with Nigeria. Or maybe we can get Monica Goodling's assistant to leave the administration and go teach economics at Regents U.
We're not dealing with normal people with normal consciences here. We haven't been since 2000.
Drangel wrote on April 12, 2007 4:16 PM:Not only was this the beginning of the Plame outing, but the beginning (March 03) of the Iraq war itself. They had lots and lots of stuff to hide, I'm sure.
Randy wrote on April 12, 2007 4:16 PM:It's time to make an example of someone and I think that some one should be ------Monica Goodling. She is the one who made the decisions for the White House, she interviewed the canidates for the AG positions, and she is the one who politized the Civil Rights Department. It's time for the country to see the damage she has done. It's time to catch this rat in a trap. Karl might have dreamed it but Monica made it happen.
Security Code: bent That's it, justice bent to fit a wingnut.
cl-Oregon Girl wrote on April 12, 2007 4:26 PM:It seems to me with all the mail monitorng going on (ie.. spying) that perhaps all this mail is NOT lost. That is, somebody (AT&T VERIZON email providers etc) were letting the NSA spy -- I wonder, just wonder whether or not some of this email got caught up in that web and was recorded.
HMMM, that would be funny and a great twist of justice if their illegal spying captured some of the email that supposedly is now gone...
In any case, there must be backup tapes, pop mailboxes, perhaps mirrored servers, that still have this info on them. I would not give up on the fact that this is lost. I would be the 'gang that couldn't shoot straight" did not effectively elimanate all copies of mail.
Someone should start digging. Any sys admins out there that might have access and the ability to recover? Think about how you could really serve your country. Think about the Nixon tapes, think about Ollie North and the files he "deleted"....
robert wrote on April 12, 2007 4:26 PM:Jason Leopold wrote a report last week for Truthout discussing in detail the missing emails related to the Plame investigation and the filing by Fitzgerald. This CREW report is based on his groundbreaking story which can be found here: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/040507J.shtml
leopold was the one who broke the news last year that about the missing emails and then how the White House turned over 250 pages of emails after Fitzgerald mentioned it in a filing.
I think Leopold was way ahead of the media and may very well have gotten too close to a story
freelunch wrote on April 12, 2007 4:34 PM:Once again, it's about the coverup. The crime of intentionally destroying e-mails is sufficient to start nailing people small and not-so-small on the way up the ladder. I won't even consider the idea that it was accidental or a mechanical failure until the White House provides evidence to a court's satisfaction that they followed proper procedures. I am confident to six sigma that this was intentional.
global yokel wrote on April 12, 2007 4:35 PM:My guess is that if Congress subpoenas the missing e-mail, they will ultimately discover that the White House staff computers themselves have been replaced. That is the best way for the administration to cover their tracks. I'll bet my last nickel that in the next couple of days some BushCo flack is going to announce that the entire computer infrastructure in the White House was overhauled, and that the hard drives that would contain incriminating emails have been scrapped and are irretrievable.
ricardo wrote on April 12, 2007 4:47 PM:" . . . Mistakes were made"
It is far past time that articles of impeachment should be brought up.
Dude wrote on April 12, 2007 4:53 PM:To me the only hope for any of these people being held responsible won't come until after the next election.
I'd like someone to publicly ask Hillary, and Barrack, and the rest this question: Upon taking office will you make it a priority to take George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and appropriate others into custody and see that they are charged with and tried for Crimes Against Peace and Crimes Against Humanity?
JPV wrote on April 12, 2007 5:00 PM:I know how those e-mails can be found...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_(FBI)
bejammin075 wrote on April 12, 2007 5:06 PM:Wouldn't this have to be deliberate destruction of evidence? Things were supposed to be setup so that 100.00% of all WH communications were preserved.
WTF!?!?
How much email has been lost over the last 6+ years? 20 million?
StephenH wrote on April 12, 2007 5:09 PM:Isn't it about time for Rosmarie Woods to step forward, and explain how she accidently spilled coffee into the White House servers?
Uncle Toby wrote on April 12, 2007 5:12 PM:Pushkin Operational Consultants (possibly connected to MZM) did some computer work for the White House in 04. Matt Pushkin might be someone Congressional investigators should chat up.
jeffgee wrote on April 12, 2007 5:14 PM:Gotta love the digital age. Diebold makes votes go poof! without a trace. Karl makes emails vanish with a couple of keystrokes.
Anarchist wrote on April 12, 2007 5:28 PM:But Gonzo and Skeletor have your emails if they want to use them to send you to Gitmo.
---"My guess is that if Congress subpoenas the missing e-mail, they will ultimately discover that the White House staff computers themselves have been replaced."---
Who was it - MZM? - that had that "Dukester" $140,000 contract to provide "furniture" to the VP?
EasyRider wrote on April 12, 2007 5:32 PM:I want some one to think about the infrastructure of using the RNC computers.
Did Bush, Cheney, and Rove setup a separate RCN network in the government (on government property)? That would be a huge security violation and against the law.
If they connected the RNC computers to the government network then that too is a security violation and against the law.
Bottom line:
Democrats need to ask for the all the communications that authorized the installation and use of the RNC computers.
Did Rove order it? Cheney? Bush?
Who ordered it?
rudy wrote on April 12, 2007 5:40 PM:This is old news. Not to us but to Fitz. Why the hell didn't this come out before now. What a load of dung!
cl-Oregon Girl wrote on April 12, 2007 5:52 PM:It really makes me mad. Public records are kept secret by these thugs. However when it comes to listening on my PRIVATE communications these assholes show no restraint. They record my email and phone calls.
They sift through it and mine it.
We trust these guys NOT to use this private info to further their political ambitions? Who is kidding who?
JB wrote on April 12, 2007 5:58 PM:I'm sure some tech-savvy reader of TPM can illuminate the finer points of retrieving "lost" or otherwise deleted emails from servers...law enforcement does it all the time in criminal cases. Perhaps it would behoove those on various interested investigative committees to subpoena the personal computers and harddrives of all those involved.
unhipcat wrote on April 12, 2007 6:33 PM:so what?
unhipcat wrote on April 12, 2007 6:36 PM:don't you think if it were important, the president and the vice president would do what is in the best interests of the nation?
I mean, after all, what would they have to hide?
hmm?
umm.
Robin wrote on April 12, 2007 7:05 PM:maybe classified info on unauthorized computer equipment?
This is no different that effectively torching an archives room in the face of an investigation.
I see impeachment as the only option.
EVEN IF there is nothing illegal going on -- INCOMPETENCE would be the lightest reasonable reason to remove everyone in the bush administration from office.
black buddha wrote on April 12, 2007 7:19 PM:Clearly you Democratists are forgeting that (Hillary) Clinton took all the "W" keys off the White House keyboards, thereby forcing Carl, Dick, Jorge, and Gonzo to arrange another system as it was impossible to type "Dick@-WWW-.passtheblood.com." Further, how can you spell WAR without a "W?"
The Clintons should be ashamed of putting a new administration in that situation.
Most importantly, George would NEVER do anything that would take away from all the cool stuff he is planning to put in his Presidential Library.
Hey, wouldn't it be cool if the W Library could be at Gitmo?
If anyone wants to donate, you can send me a check. I promise I'll get it to George.
Jerry Ferrier wrote on April 12, 2007 7:34 PM:They probably think the data is gone and they are home free. Not so, not even close. Somewhere in the system the information is hiding on a backup server! The commities just have to go after it.
Jimmy Johnson wrote on April 12, 2007 7:52 PM:What do you mean "unbelievable"? It sounds like "business as usual" to me.
BobN wrote on April 12, 2007 8:19 PM:Bush isn't the Decider... he's the Deleter
Anonymous wrote on April 12, 2007 8:35 PM:Missing emails causes your outrage meter to blow? Where have you been the last six years? Did anyone really expect records would be left? Your collective outrage is wasted energy.
hepwa wrote on April 12, 2007 9:24 PM:5 million emails over two and a half years. 50 White House staffers with RNC laptops/email addresses working 300 days a year (fat chance) means over 100 individual emails per day. Is anyone even working for the PEOPLE! If I wasn't so outraged, I'd say this is going to get good.
chris miller wrote on April 12, 2007 9:55 PM:Impeach
Resign
Or Be
Complicit
Democrats
[Ahhh! synchonicity, my code is 'sheep']
Peter Kohan wrote on April 12, 2007 10:06 PM:Let's not forget that this missing e-mail traffic might also relate to Iraq, Katrina, and the 2004 election strategy and execution. Not insignificant events!
Chan wrote on April 12, 2007 10:17 PM:It is not about covering Gonzales, the emails were deleted to protect the Bush / Cheney from war crime trial.
curious wrote on April 12, 2007 10:20 PM:Peter,
Not to mention gutting environmental laws, energy and pharma policies, Cunningham investigation, judicial appointments, and so on and so on . . .
Mauimom wrote on April 12, 2007 10:30 PM:Head on over to FireDogLake and the Next Hurrah for extensive discussions about how difficult it is to "really delete" e-mails and the many ways they could be recovered.
Ron Legro wrote on April 12, 2007 10:35 PM:The real irony here is that Bush is busy trying to build the largest presidential library by far, and yet his staff is busy removing all the files and records that would fill the shelves of that library. If, of course, it was really intended to be library. I suspect it'll be more of a dubya-worship wax museum. "Mission accomplished" and all that there stuff.
Anonymous wrote on April 12, 2007 10:41 PM:the ultimate problem here is that the neoconservative bush doctrine, which is built around the malleability of "truth", fails to recognize that money and authority aren't the only determiners of what the truth is.
security code: free
curious wrote on April 12, 2007 11:03 PM:Ironically, one key objection of professors at SMU, where Bush plans to build his mamouth monument to himself (library, museum and institute/gop think tank)is Bush's effort to legislatively preclude public disclosure of designated presidential records forever . . .forever. Although I can't find the Dallas Morning News article that references this issue, I did find a reference to a Waxman bill that might be intended to thwart Bush's effort.
See H.R.1255 - -Title: To amend chapter 22 of title 44, United States Code, popularly known as the Presidential Records Act, to establish procedures for the consideration of claims of constitutionally based privilege against disclosure of Presidential records.
Sponsor: Rep Waxman, Henry A. [CA-30] (introduced 3/1/2007.
This prpbably warrants investigation. Ultimately, if all the e-mails are gone and records destroyed, and Dubya gets impeached, the point will be moot - the Nation, SMU, Park Cities residents, Methodists decent people everywhere can join in a collective sigh of relief.
curious wrote on April 12, 2007 11:16 PM:Regret the typos. By relief, I mean relief that Bush will have been exposed, impeached and out of office. If that were to occur, some transparency will have been restored to government, perhaps Rove and cohorts will be in the pen and a major overhaul of our corrupt system of government will be undertaken. Perhaps we'd get out of Iraq, get lobbyists out of government, sign the Kyoto Treaty, re-join civilized world in our approach to human rights, and over time, regain our moral standing as a world leader.
One can dream.
pstamler wrote on April 13, 2007 1:57 AM:You don't think impeachment is coming? I think it is. The congressional leadership is properly holding back, waiting to be oh-so-reluctantly forced to investigate. Meanwhile the White House Horrors (to lift a phrase from Watergate) are coming at us faster and faster. The mainstream media are even beginning to rouse from their torpor, although they're still pretty sluggish.
It's coming. If, of course, Bush & Cheney don't stage a military coup first -- but they'll have to do it with their private army, since the real one is otherwise occupied at the moment.
Peace,
sharpie wrote on April 13, 2007 2:04 AM:Paul
Just like the 340 tons of US ammunition that got "lost" in Iraq, -- and they blame Iran for arming the insurgents!
Those Bushites are such numbnuts. Impeach - for no other reason but to keep Bush from spending a penny on a lie-bury!!
sharpie wrote on April 13, 2007 2:09 AM:Bush's lie-bury - if it ever materializes - should be housed in Gitmo or in the old Enron building. Lay's estate can pay for it.
Leave the taxpayers and Methodists out of it - no one deserves the stain of Bush's legacy attached to it.
Iraq is enough of a monument to Bush's idiocy.
curious wrote on April 13, 2007 2:29 AM:Reassuring . . .hope you guys are right.
angrydem wrote on April 13, 2007 9:17 AM:no comment, cause my Security Code sums it up nicely:
PUSH
buck turgidson wrote on April 13, 2007 11:41 AM:Randy posted yesterday probably the most insightful reminder of the historical significance of this administration--the NSA has their emails. Of course, the NSA will not share because it's not supposed to have the emails.
The White House is the opposite--they don't have the emails even though they are supposed to have them. But even if they did, they would not share, because they are not supposed to have what's IN the emails.
Can we just padlock the White House for the next two years with the entire cabal inside it, and cut off their communications? The MSM is their life support--cut off the media and they'll wither and die.
scrapironchef wrote on April 13, 2007 12:04 PM:Who knew it was possible to get an IT degree in Email Admin from Liberty University?
Rick Cass wrote on April 13, 2007 1:10 PM:Security word:crush. Has the comment program developed a sense of humor?
jimbo92107 wrote on April 13, 2007 2:47 PM:Oh come on, who can blame Karl Rove for deleting all those emails? Jeeze, if people found out what he and his buddies were planning, they'd all go to prison for the rest of their lives!
matt wrote on April 13, 2007 8:25 PM:Something in the back of my mind keeps hinting at missing laptops from Justice, the Department of Energy, and whole desktop computers missing from the Defense Department. Why wasn't more made about that when the friggin wingnut community went nuts on Wen Ho Lee when they were trying lie crazy (literally) to make the case for a massive Chinese espionage operation within the Clinton administration?
What was on those computers?
Also, don't ISPs keep records of everything? How come I can't get rid of emails I thought I deleted three weeks ago?
I mean, any good forensic computer specialist who works in the, oh I don't know, money laundering division of the FBI, should be able to retrieve just about anyting from any computer unless it has been physically destroyed and I don't mean just having the hard drive reformatted.
This is a load of crap that they hope everyone will just accept because of the average American's knowledge (or lack thereof) about computers.
I think it's past time to go to a judge and get a warrant to seize everything in sight in the DoJ and the RNC before much more stuff is contaminated or destroyed.
psyopswatcher wrote on April 13, 2007 8:52 PM:Leahy told someone that he has a teenage kid in the neighborhood that can go get the deleted emails for them.
Giving them the benefit of the doubt, 990,000-ish of them were probably spaiku.
Send in some IT teams to start copying files to disk. Two teams, one to copy the backup files, one to swap out hard drives on the laptops.
Then we can have some continuity in government while this mess gets sorted out.
SC: Clean, time to clean some clocks.
Rick Cass, the security code program makes a fun tool for sarcasm , mockery, and derision. It's good to get it out of your system, and writing is a wonderful way to do it. I don't know who started it, but these guys rock and are very funny, good chuckles. It's only mandatory to enter, not comment on but somehow a phenom that sprung up on this site.
Brad wrote on April 16, 2007 11:14 PM:"two confidential sources independently informed CREW that the administration abandoned a plan to recover more than five million missing emails;"
Duhh...
im sure they did more than that, i bet they did everything they could to erase the drives altogether.
I am a bit confused though, could they not just create a hotmail account for stuff they didnt want be archived ?
Even then, its possible for the FBI to get those records, but the FBI would have to know the account exists first.
No telling how much stuff is there, all the lies of 9/11 included.
Brad wrote on April 16, 2007 11:27 PM:i just found this which basically mimicked my feelings toward the matter.
--------
do you think this will make congress begin impeachment proceedings?
you know it appears to be a conspiracy that congress is allowing this to go on to me. when you have information about a duck, and you ID the duck. You have the quack on tape, and you have voiceprinted that quack to this duck, the duck admits that it knows the chicken, and the chicken has copped a plea about the duck and an unnamed goose.
an unprecedented, day to day revelation of another crime in the obstruction of justice. if you add up the other crimes, they are enough to impeach. But our congress sits on their hands when an ongoing soap opera of crime and conspiracy takes place before them and does nothing to stop it.
Comment by oldtree
thinkprogress.org
-----
cheers,
Brad
Bush humor
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armand agresti wrote on April 25, 2007 10:09 AM:another bloched job.
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mari wrote on January 19, 2008 2:21 AM:The lies never stop!!!!!!!!! You know, Oooops, just so happens that the emails covering the outing of a Clandestine operative, mercy, mercy, they just disappeared, ya know! Valerie Plame was a clandestine operative whose expertise was in evaluation of start-up nuclear programs with special emphasis to Iran. So someone did this treasonous thing at a time that even the Administration says has been a critical era in Iran's nuclear development. When this administration starts ranting about another country, I always divide by 10,000 and subtract 40 and even then, the estimate may still be grossly trumped up.
The tape destructions covering the times when all that grossly illegal behavior in the executive branch took place just assures all of us that once again, the President and his fellow law -breakers were at work with their phony excuses. Of course all emails had to be erased.
AND, we must not forget the Bushies Carl and Scooter who strangely have greatly benefited by the illegal disappearance of those tapes. Actually it is really quite difficult to erase stuff altogether. It takes true criminality of grossly incompetent people to do such a stupid thing. AND, remember these are the guys with their hands on the black box that will mutilate and kill millions and millions all over the world. Geee, and these goofs cannot even make certain that the law was followed to preserve those records. All who believe this crap about "it was just a itly bitsy mishap, please meet me on mars next Friday.