The Nation: The missing-emails saga continues to unspool.

[marmar]

BLOG | Posted 03/27/2008 @ 11:37am
But That Would Be Hard
Te-Ping Chen


The White House missing-emails saga continues to unspool. At this point, it's increasingly come to resemble a series of repetitive Onion headlines.

White House Official Tells Judge Searching for Missing Emails Too Much Work
by Jason Leopold / March 24th, 2008

The White House’s chief information officer said the Bush administration should not be compelled to search for millions of emails on individual computers and hard drives that may have been lost between 2003 and 2005 because it would be too expensive and require hundreds of hours of work, according to a filing the White House made with a federal court late Friday.

Friday’s court filing by the White House came in response to an order issued by U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola last week demanding that the White House show cause why it should not be ordered to create and preserve a “forensic copy” of emails from individual hard drives. Facciola entered the order in part because the White House admitted that it did not preserve back-up tapes prior to October 2003.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and George Washington University’s National Security Archive sued the Bush administration last year alleging the White House violated the Presidential Records Act by not archiving emails sent and received between 2003 and 2005.

In documents filed with Faciolla Friday, Theresa Payton, the chief information officer at the White House Office of Administration, said the White House routinely destroyed its hard drives every three years “in order to run updated software, reduce ongoing maintenance, and enhance security assurance. So its unlikely that any lost emails would be retrieved anyway.

“When workstations are at the end of their lifecycle and retired… under the refresh program, the hard drives are generally sent offsite to another government entity for physical destruction in accordance with Department of Defense guidelines,” states Payton’s sworn affidavit filed with Facciola late Friday. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/03/white-house-official-tells-judge-searching-for-missing-emails-too-much-work/

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/jstreet?bid=917

[dysfunctional press]

1. it's TOO HARD to obey the law...

can i use that one on the i.r.s...? :shrug:

[Supersedeas]

2. unlikely - the right to ignore law is reserved for rightwing cronies only