Bush White House Failed To Archive 21 Days Of E-mail
May 17, 2010
| 4:05 PM
The administration of then-President George W. Bush failed to archive 83 percent of e-mails for 21 days during a two-year period, according to watchdog groups that retrieved the information in lawsuit settlements.
Nextgov.com reported that Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive filed a lawsuit against the Bush White House in 2007 after discovering the administration could not account for millions of e-mails. In 2009, the Obama White House settled the case, agreeing to audit archived messages and those restored from backup tapes for 21 separate days between 2003 and 2005. Those days were identified as having a suspiciously low amount of e-mail traffic.
The comparison revealed that 83 percent of the e-mails on the backup tapes were not included in the archived collection and would have been lost if not for the lawsuits, the groups said Monday.
CREW, a government accountability group, and the National Security Archive, which releases declassified documents through the Freedom of Information Act, said they are concerned that more e-mails could be missing because the White House used flawed methodology to identify those days that had low volumes of e-mails.
The organizations sent letters on Monday to the U.S. Archivist, the White House counsel, the federal chief information officer, and the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, asking them to resolve a governmentwide problem of poor e-mail management. To read more, click here.
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