From the Washington Post this morning I read this headline “White House Has No Comprehensive E-Mail Archive”.
WTF?
From the Washington Post:
For years, the Bush administration has relied on an inadequate archiving system for storing the millions of e-mails sent through White House servers, despite court orders and statutes requiring the preservation of such records, according to documents and technical experts.
So, what you’re telling me is that my Mom has a better email archival process than the White House? Cheebus.
President Bush’s White House early on scrapped a custom archiving system that the Clinton administration had adopted under a federal court order. From 2001 to 2003, the Bush White House also recorded over computer backup tapes that provided a last line of defense for preserving e-mails, even though a similar practice landed the Clinton administration in legal trouble.
It’s amazing how the Bush White House seems to feel that the law doesn’t apply to them. So, thousands of emails have been “lost” that could land a lot of people in a court room? How convenient. I do find amusement that the OMB is now “looking” into data security. And then this passage:
In the presidential offices, for example, not a single e-mail was archived on Dec. 17, 20 or 21 in 2003 — the week after the capture of Saddam Hussein. According to the study summary that the committee released, e-mails were not archived for Vice President Cheney’s office on four days in early October 2003, coinciding with the start of a Justice Department probe into the leak of a CIA officer’s identity, which later led to criminal charges against Cheney’s chief of staff.
I’m at a loss.
