Q&A: White House E-mail Lawyer Anne Weismann

CREW issues its final report on a fading scandal

In April 2007, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington told the world that the White House had failed to comply with its legal obligation to properly retain and archive e-mail records. The revelation came after the Abramoff scandal revealed that some officials were using private e-mail accounts to conduct official business, but this was something different: CREW alleged that at least five million e-mails had been lost due to the White House’s failure to implement a comprehensive e-mail archiving system.

That report kicked off a long-running saga, driven by investigations by Representative Henry Waxman and lawsuits from National Security Archive, the George Washington University-based records watchdog, and CREW. The Obama administration settled the cases in December 2009, agreeing to release documents that recorded their predecessor’s response to the crisis. From these tens of thousands of pages of documents, CREW produced what should be the final word on the issue, a fifty-plus page report which was released last month.

CREW was originally alerted to the problem from whistleblowers, who told of their superiors’ disinterest in efforts to grasp the full extent of the problem, to propose solutions, and to archive what stray e-mails could be found scatted across various computers or on the White House’s emergency backup tapes. While the nature of the problem—how can you count things that are missing?—has obscured the full extent of any data loss, a White House internal analysis from 2006, before the problem went public, showed that there were 473 days where a component of the White House registered not a single archived e-mail. Another 229 days had abnormally low numbers of archived e-mails.

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Source: cjr.org
By: Clint Hendler