Long Article w/ many links, WA POST: Where Are the E-mails? by Dan Froomkin

[L. Coyote]

"defendants shall preserve media, no matter how described, presently in their possession or under their custody or control, that were created with the intention of preserving data in the event of its inadvertent destruction. Defendants shall preserve the media under conditions that will permit their eventual use, if necessary, and shall not transfer said media out of their custody or control without leave of this court."

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Where Are the E-mails? by Dan Froomkin
Nov 13, 2007 - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/11/13/BL2007111300956.html?hpid=opinionsbox1


Why is it taking White House officials so long to restore millions of deleted e-mails from the backup tapes they claim to have?

The e-mails in question date from March 2003 to October 2005 -- a crucial period that includes the Iraq invasion, a presidential election and Hurricane Katrina.

White House officials have known for more than two years that the messages were deleted -- a clear violation of presidential records-preservation statutes. But the president's aides won't explain what happened, what sort of backups they have and what they're doing about it.

That obstinacy led a federal judge to step in yesterday and order the White House to preserve every bit of related data in its possession -- just to make sure nothing untoward happens ....

......

[L. Coyote]

1. Casual Lawbreaking at the White House

Casual Lawbreaking at the White House
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, June 19, 2007; 1:14 PM - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/06/19/BL2007061900924.html

New evidence unearthed by House Democrats establishes that White House political adviser Karl Rove and many of his colleagues used Republican National Committee e-mail accounts for official business -- even though White House policy is clear that doing so is a violation of the Presidential Records Act.

How did such casual lawbreaking come to be so widespread? And why was it tolerated? Those are among the questions the White House has yet to answer satisfactorily.

.............. another possibility, of course, is that Rove and the others chose to use the RNC e-mail accounts for official business as a way to keep their e-mail from public scrutiny, which is implicit in the use of White House e-mail accounts. If that was their goal, they appear to have succeeded.

Unlike the White House, whose e-mail retention rules essentially preserve everything forever, the RNC automatically deleted most e-mails after 30 days and allowed users to manually delete whatever they felt like. ............

[L. Coyote]

2. E-Mail Saga Gets Fishier

E-Mail Saga Gets Fishier
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, April 13, 2007; 1:42 PM - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/04/13/BL2007041301125.html

The saga of the missing White House e-mails took a turn from the deeply suspicious to the deeply, darkly suspicious yesterday as Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman disclosed the bizarre response by the Republican National Committee to early indications that consequential White House e-mails -- particularly to and from Karl Rove -- were being deleted.

From 2001 to 2004, the RNC's highly unusual "document retention" policy was to intentionally destroy all e-mails that were more than 30 days old. In the summer of 2004, due to "unspecified legal inquiries," the RNC changed its policy by allowing -- but not mandating -- the indefinite retention of e-mails sent and received by White House staffers on their RNC accounts. That was just around the time special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald's investigation of White House involvement in the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity was kicking into high gear.

Then, in 2005, when RNC officials discovered that all of Rove's RNC e-mails were still getting deleted, presumably by Rove himself, they blocked his ability -- and his ability alone -- to do that. Other White House staffers could still delete at will, just not Rove.

All this stands in dramatic contrast to explicit White House rules mandating that all official White House electronic communications take place exclusively through official White House e-mail accounts, which are supposed to automatically archive everything forever.

Rove, the Bush administration's ultimate political fixer, reportedly ...............