February 21, 2009
Archive Opposes Government Motion that Shows E-Mail Restoration Still Is Not Complete, Three Years After Independent Counsel Exposed Missing Cheney E-MailWashington, D.C. - The Justice Department this week missed the opportunity to bring transparency to the controversy over deleted White House e-mail from the Bush administration by allowing briefing to continue on a motion that had been developed by the Bush Administration.
The motion, filed by the Justice Department on January 21, just after the inauguration, sought to dismiss the White House e-mail litigation even while admitting that a secretive restoration process was still not finished . . .”
The independent counsel investigating the Valerie Plame/Scooter Libby case first exposed the problem of missing White House e-mail in a court filing in January 2006, citing whole days of zero archived e-mail from Vice President Cheney’s office. Bush White House statements initially admitted that as many as 5 million e-mails were missing, then subsequently denied any problem. The most recent briefing makes clear that a far larger number of emails were effectively lost because they were mislabeled or misallocated and required extensive technical work to be found, while still additional emails were completely missing from the EOP server.
The National Security Archive’s opposition filed yesterday disputes those claims pointing out:
* The White House motion acknowledges that the restoration effort is not complete;
* The White House inexplicably selected for restoration e-mails from only a portion of the days that they themselves acknowledge have deleted e-mails;
* The White House did not conduct an analysis or restoration for the entire period during which emails are alleged to have been deleted;
* The White House excluded key periods from their analysis and restoration effort allegedly because of the migration from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange;
* The White House relied on a statistical analysis for its estimation of whether emails were missing that used as a starting point, the quantity of email on the very servers that the White House now acknowledges were incomplete; and
* The White House has provided no evidence that any of the problems that led to the loss, mislabeling, and misallocation of emails have been corrected . . .
more from the AP:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hsG0My2Q3Eu9Sj2PSupnj4xeQXxAD96G4J9G0Obama administration tries to kill e-mail caseTwo advocacy groups suing the Executive Office of the President say that large amounts of White House e-mail documenting Bush's eight years in office may still be missing, and that the government must undertake an extensive recovery effort. They expressed disappointment that Obama's Justice Department is continuing the Bush administration's bid to get the lawsuits dismissed.
"We do not know how many more e-mails could be restored but have not been, because defendants have not looked," the National Security Archive said in the court papers.
"The new administration seems no more eager than the last" to deal with the issue, said Anne Weismann, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the other group that sued the EOP.
A chronology of the litigation is available here:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20080417/chron.htm 
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