White House Loses 473 Days Worth of Email Records

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but every once in a while there is something in the news that makes me want to start working on my tinfoil hat. This Washington Post article is one of those things. The Presidential Records Act should not be news to the IT staff at the White House. It’s been in place since 1978. They had 23 years before the Bush administration started to get this right. There’s no excuse, which leads one to believe that there is something to hide.

Why the secrecy, anyway? The Executive Branch (and all of the government) exists to perform the people’s business. I understand that some issues are secret due to national security reasons, but some of the agencies that “lost” emails include the Council on Environmental Quality, the Council of Economic Advisers, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. I don’t have to tell you that these agencies are not the front lines of the “Global War on Terra ™”. The question is whether or not this is incompetence or some sort of fraud. The stonewalling we see from the Bush administration in the face of Congressional inquiries tends to make me believe it’s the latter.

From the article:

The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional Democrat.

The 2005 study — whose credibility the White House attacked this week — identified 473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices, said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

I’m pretty sure that the Post missed the irony of the White House trying to discredit the results of its own internal investigations. It’s also important to note that this study actually covers a different window in time than the missing emails documented in this diary by Scout Finch. This appears to be a coordinated effort to avoid complying with the Presidential Records Act, and this administration must be held accountable.