MSNBC - 22million lost Bush emails found!

[GreatCaesarsGhost]

Developing... per MSNBC.

They were mislabeled!

[myrna minx]

1. They were in the folder titled "Cartoonish Super Villainy", I'd wager.

[Echo In Light]

23. self delete - wrong spot

[DavidDvorkin]

2. If this is true

and if they're released, the results could be delightful.

[Echo In Light]

7. _

[bdamomma]

3. hmmm.. will this get them convicted, that would be a great

Christmas present have the bush regime arrested. in my dreams/nightmares perhaps.

[Snazzy]

4. spam filter? (nt)

[NightWatcher]

5. Puhleeze let there be some good damning shit in them

[lyonspotter]

16. How could there not be?!

22 million e-mails cannot smell like a rose after all the shyte they pulled in the open!

[PRETZEL]

6. Probably labeled NSFW n/t

[drbtg1]

31. LMAO!

This is definitely the funniest thing I've read here in a long time!

[Duer 157099]

8. Oboy, I hope the contents don't get revealed right away

Let all those Bushies start sweating to see who's going to talk first

[louis-t]

9. Mislabeled on purpose, no doubt.

"Don't look at these emails, nothing in here that you want to seeeeeeee"

[monmouth]

10. Both Cheeeeneys will be all over our TVs now doing CYA management..n/t

[Soylent Brice]

11. good. can't wait to see what fucked up mess comes out of this.

[Motown_Johnny]

12. Hmmm.... I wonder how they will invoke Executive Privilege with these???

[Snazzy]

13. Something with this: CREW and Obama Administration Settle Lawsuit Over Missing Bush WH Emails

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 14, 2009
2:42 PM


CONTACT: CREW
Matt Jacob 202.408.5565
CREW and Obama Administration Settle Lawsuit Over Missing Bush White House Emails

WASHINGTON - December 14 - Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the National Security Archive (NSA) reached a final settlement of their long-running lawsuits challenging the failure of the Bush White House and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to take any action after confronted with evidence that millions of emails had gone missing from Bush White House servers over a two and one-half year period. The lawsuits followed CREW's revelation in April 2008 that the White House had discovered the problem in the fall of 2005. Nevertheless, the Bush White House failed to recover or restore the missing emails and knowingly continued to use a broken system for preserving electronic records.

Under the terms of the settlement, the Executive Office of the President (EOP) will restore a total of 94 days of missing emails, which will then be sent to NARA for preservation and eventual access under either the Presidential Records Act or the Federal Records Act. The dates for restoration were chosen based on email volume and external events because there simply was not enough money to restore all the missing emails. In addition, the EOP will continue to provide CREW and the NSA with records documenting the missing email problem, the response of the Bush White House to that problem, and the options the Bush White House considered for preserving electronic records, but inexplicably rejected.

To date, the Obama White House has produced thousands of pages of documents relating to these issues, all of which CREW has posted on www.governmentdocs.org. Finally, the EOP will be providing a publicly releasable description of the system it now uses to manage and preserve electronic records, including its email archiving and backup systems. CREW and the NSA will then dismiss their lawsuits.

Documents produced so far show the Bush White House was lying when officials claimed no emails were ever missing. The record now proves incontrovertibly that Bush administration officials deliberately ignored the problem and, in fact, knowingly allowed it to worsen. Some questions remain unanswered. Why, after the Office of Administration told then-White House Counsel Harriet Miers about the problem and presented her with a plan to restore the emails, did she do nothing? Why did the White House abandon -- at the last minute -- a system it had developed to manage and preserve electronic records, despite having spent millions to create it? Did the Bush White House properly respond to requests for records from the Department of Justice and Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald during the investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's covert CIA identity?

Melanie Sloan, CREW's Executive Director, said, "We may never know exactly what happened to all the missing emails, and which Bush administration officials were involved in the coverup, but we do know the American public never got the full story." After the Obama administration produces all the promised records, CREW will release a report, providing as much detail as possible. Sloan continued, "The Obama administration, which inherited the lawsuits and the dysfunctional White House email system, has done a terrific job straightening out the mess. Thanks to the Obama White House, a critical part of our nation's missing history will be restored. This is yet another example of the administration living up to its promise of accountability and transparency."

[Snazzy]

19. Natl Security Archive PR/link

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20091214/index.htm

National Security Archive and White House Reach Agreement for Restoration of Missing Bush White House E-mails

For more information contact:
Meredith Fuchs - 202/994-7000

Posted - December 14, 2009

Washington, DC, December 14, 2009 - The National Security Archive (the Archive), Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the White House and the National Archives and Records Administratioeren (NARA) today entered into an agreement setting forth general principles that will resolve the missing White House e-mail lawsuit filed first by the Archive in September 2007.

"We commend the Obama Administration for making a strong effort to clean up the electronic data mess left behind by the prior administration," commented Sheila Shadmand, counsel for the Archive.

"We now know that many poor choices were made during the Bush Administration and there was little concern about the availability of e-mail records despite the fact that they were contending with regular subpoenas for records and had a legal obligation to preserve their records for the nation's long term historical memory," explained Meredith Fuchs, the Archive's General Counsel.

"We have done our best in this case to maximize the number of e-mails that have been found or reconstructed from disaster recovery backup tapes," explained Kristen Lejnieks, counsel for the Archive. "The government can now can find and search over 22 million more e-mails than they could in late 2005. They also will restore 94 calendar days from backup tapes. We certainly hope that many major gaps in the record have been filled."

"The absence of best business practices permitted a loss of data that was completely preventable," explained Al Lakhani, an expert, and Managing Partner with Alvarez & Marsal. "Today's technology permits reliable archiving and effective control over deletion of records."

Commenting on the state of the current White House e-mail system, Ms. Fuchs stated: "We have been briefed on the system in use since the beginning of the Obama Administration and we believe that the system now in use fixes the significant problems with the prior system, including by capturing everything, properly categorizing the e-mails, and preventing unauthorized deletion."

The Archive's lawsuit impacted White House e-mail records in a number of ways:

* Increased the Number of Preserved Emails: As a result of the three phase e-mail restoration process pursued during this lawsuit, the Defendants found, sorted and properly categorized 22 million more emails than they could find in late 2005. (Everett Decl. at 6). In addition, during this process the Office of Administration identified "other repositories" of email, "which added approximately one million unique messages" to the email archive. (Everett Decl. at 8.)

* Preservation of Records During the Transition: The lawsuit ensured the preservation of all media during the presidential transition that contained emails from March 2003 through October 2005. The backup tapes will continue to be preserved for 12 years after the settlement of this suit, ensuring that this crucial data remains available to the public.

* Disaster Recovery Backup System: The lawsuit drew attention to the poor backup system utilized by the White House Office of Administration for the Executive Office of the President and helped lead to implementation of more reliable practices.

* Better Searching: EOP/OA completely revamped its process for allocating messages to presidential and federal records components at the White House so that future records searches will be more accurate.

* Restored Missing Emails from Backup Tapes: At the completion of restoration efforts, this lawsuit will have resulted in the restoration of 94 days worth of emails from disaster recovery backup tapes --likely adding hundreds of thousands of unique messages to NARA's archive. These include 21 calendar days (containing 48 component days) that the White House identified as statistically low, 33 additional days that the plaintiffs identified, and 40 sample days.

* Going Forward System: This lawsuit paved the way for a new e-mail archiving system currently in use at the White House.

---------

From their timeline:

Consider the time period of the missing email. Early 2002 was the peak of the
Afghanistan war, just as special forces troops were being shifted to plan for what ultimately
became the war in Iraq. Roundups and renditions after 9/11 were reaching their peak as well.
March 2003 was the month of the invasion of Iraq. The following two and a half years would
include the revelations of Abu Ghraib, the rise of the insurgency in Iraq, the 2004 elections,
Hurricane Katrina, an investigation into the disclosure of the covert CIA status of Valerie Plame,
and the allegedly political firing of United States Attorneys.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20091214/summary_email_case.pdf

[Uncle Joe]

38. 94 days from two and half years seems paltry. n/t

[glen123098]

14. How do you lose 22 million emails?

[lyonspotter]

17. lol! nt

[Soylent Brice]

21. EASY:

or an attempt to, at least.

[Tippy]

25. Guess you better ask Rove and Cheeny or is that Chennie....

[Xithras]

28. You know, that's a really good question.

I've had an email archiver running since putting up my first personal mail server in 1996, and the last time I checked it had just over 100,000 emails in the database (spam doesn't get archived). If you sent me an email in 1997, I can pull it up and read it in about 3 minutes.

That archive is about 16Gb with compression activated. Doing a little math, that puts a 22 million email archive at about 3.5 terabytes, compressed. How in the world does ANYONE misplace 3.5 terabytes?

[Hutzpa]

15. well, well, well

:popcorn:

[Old and In the Way]

18. The Holy Grail of war crimes.

I'm betting that they thought the rnc.com server would save them from public record keeping and there's lots of incriminating evidence to be mined. Could be interesting. I'll volunteer to read and report on all e-mails from 9/00 to 9/11/01....

[lpbk2713]

20. He put them all aside to wait until he could sit down with a dictionary.

Or until he could have someone conversant in the English language
explain to him what the sender was trying to communicate.

[Contrary1]

22. Get the paddles ready for the Big Dick...

He'll be needing some resuscitation pretty soon.

[Fumesucker]

36. His pacemaker has a defib built in, IIRC n/t

[liberalmuse]

37. Fuck that. HIDE the paddles.

Have a little humanity. :rofl:

[Echo In Light]

24. Oh, come on...it's clear by now that "Look Ahead" is official, & these won't lead to jack shit

[Soylent Brice]

26. link

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34419592/ns/politics/

[Uben]

27. Takes a while to scrub 22 million emails....

...only took a couple of years, though, so they musta had a few people working on it.

[DainBramaged]

29. Does anyone think this is a distraction to take the heat off of healthcare negotiations?

:tinfoilhat: :tinfoilhat: :tinfoilhat: :tinfoilhat: :tinfoilhat: :tinfoilhat:

[bvar22]

30. That's nice, but NOTHING will happen.

The official Obama Policy is to look the other way ("look forward") while all this is swept under the rug.

[Blue_Tires]

32. 22 million? he needs to clear his inbox once in awhile!

[Taverner]

33. They'll show pictures of Bush and Cheney sodomizing babies...

And any disciplinary action will be off the table

[woodsprite]

34. And if they DO release them, every other word will be redacted. n/t

[Missy Vixen]

35. Sure they were

The forensics people made a big, big find.

This has the ability to be huge, but I'm sure the current administration will refuse to do anything about it...

:eyes: