About Those Emails? The Contractor Did It

/in /by

I guess if you make sure your contractors can’t reveal what they’ve done in your name, it becomes harder for others to discover what it is that you, personally, have done. But not impossible. The IT companies for the White House are denying that their the company that missed 5 million missing emails in their daily audits.

When Congress asked about 5 million executive branch e-mails that wentmissing, a White House lawyer pointed the finger at an outside ITcontractor.

The only problem? No such IT contractor exists, according tosources close to the investigation of a possible violation of theFederal Records and Presidential Records acts.

[snip]

Contrary to Roberts’ statement to the Oversight Committee, severalsources, including an IT company currently doing contractual work forthe Executive Office of the President, have told ChannelWeb that nooutside company had a managed services contract to audit the Executive Office of the President’s e-mail archiving system daily during the period when the e-mails went missing.

"There are many contractors working for the [Information Assurance]Directorate and no single one provided audit and archive functions,"said a spokesperson for Unisys, an IT security and hardware firm whichhas provided the Executive Office of the President "with a variety ofIT services that support the Office of Administration."

"We don’t believe that Unisys is the Information AssuranceDirectorate contractor to which Deputy Attorney General Keith Robertsreferred when he briefed Rep. Waxman’s committee in May," said LisaMeyer, director of public relations for the Blue Bell, Penn.-basedcompany.

For the record, we might want to distrust Unisys on this point. After all, they’re the company supposedly in charge of monitoring Homeland Security’s computer system. And they seemed to have missed basic things–like installing security devices on Homeland Security’s networks.

  2. Jeff says:

    Keith Roberts was, by the way and I believe, the point of contact in the Office of Administration or whatever it was that carried out the email searches on behalf at least of OVP and presumably the White House altogether in Fitzgerald’s grand jury investigation. I think there was some documentary evidence entered in at Libby’s trial that was correspondence between Addington and Roberts. Going by memory here.

  3. Jodi says:

    Well, so what?

    I seem to remember people on TNH and Waxman and maybe Schumer saying that email couldn’t disappear. That copies would be all over the place. And who was it that was going to get a forensic computer guy/gal to ferret out the missing bits here and there?

    Surely those people weren’t wrong again.

  4. Jodi says:

    Well, so what?

    I seem to remember people on TNH and Waxman and maybe Schumer saying that email couldn’t disappear. That copies would be all over the place. And who was it that was going to get a forensic computer guy/gal to ferret out the missing bits here and there?

    Surely those people weren’t wrong again.

  7. William Ockham says:

    I suppose I feel a little better about not being able to find the contractor from the federal spending database. This article does confirm one suspicion I’ve had all along:

    The time period for the abandonment of the legacy archival system coincides with the Executive Office of the President’s switch from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook…

  8. Shit Stain Remover says:

    Well, so what? I seem to remember people on TNH and Waxman and maybe Schumer saying that email couldn’t disappear. That copies would be all over the place. And who was it that was going to get a forensic computer guy/gal to ferret out the missing bits here and there? Surely those people weren’t wrong again.

    Posted by: Jodi | October 04, 2007 at 00:58

    So what? So what about the presidential records act law. So what about the the accidental or intentional destruction of executive office email which must be preserved under the law. So what if these records were not available to be produced under subpeona.

    Shit stain cannot understand â€so what†but shit stain can remember that electronic email systems are complex and can leave data in many locations such as in the message store, on the local hard drive and on backup tapes. Shit stain takes pleasure in the fact there is no news that some of this data will be recovered becuase it makes informed people here look wrong.

    Shit stain Jodi thinks shit stain Jodi is right when others are wrong. Shit stain.

  9. sojourner says:

    William Ockham, I surmised several months ago that many of the emails are stored in personal Lotus Notes archives that still exist on individual computers. Those archives have to be physically converted from Lotus Notes to Exchange / Outlook and is something of a major effort, even using conversion software. I went through a similar project last year just for a few people and it was a royal pain! Maybe it was just not deemed to be necessary, or they only converted email archives for the most important persons. If they were converted, they are sitting in a separate *.PST file on the hard drives…

  11. JohnLopresti says:

    I understand this is a complex matter, extending beyond that link, but the timeline for mailserver conversion fits Rozen’s description of the furniture and computer replacement contract MZM processed.

  12. Anonymous says:

    Or maybe the contractor didn’t do it… or anything else for that matter…

    Someone (who must remain nameless) wrote to me today who was really disgusted with the amount of fraud and corruption evident in defense contracting in general and the Airforce in particular. They wanted to share this with more people, so gave me permission to post it where it might be appreciated. So, here it is. -GFS

    ————————————————

    Wednesday, October 03, 2007

    Sopranos running the USAF?

    Remember those great episodes of The Sopranos where you had the â€no-work†or â€no-show†contracts on a construction site. Just hang out in the seat smoking a cigar, having a drink all while being paid full? Well, it looks like the USAF has decided to â€Benchmark†that process.

    While waiting to be confirmed by the White House for a top civilian post at the Air Force last year, Charles D. Riechers was out of work and wanted a paycheck. So the Air Force helped arrange a job through an intelligence contractor that required him to do no work for the company, according to documents and interviews.

    For two months, Riechers held the title of senior technical adviser and received about $13,400 a month at Commonwealth Research Institute, or CRI, a nonprofit firm in Johnstown, Pa., according to his resume. But during that time he actually worked for Sue C. Payton, assistant Air Force secretary for acquisition, on projects that had nothing to do with CRI, he said.

    Riechers said in an interview that his interactions with Commonwealth Research were limited largely to a Christmas party, where he said he met company officials for the first time.

    â€I really didn’t do anything for CRI,†said Riechers, now principal deputy assistant secretary for acquisition. â€I got a paycheck from them.â€

    That my friend is fraud – or at least it sounds like that outside the Beltway. People can go to jail for such things, if it is against the law in 202. It is one thing to have orders to one UIC and then go around a insufficient manning document and work in another (or like RADM Sestak, USN (Ret) cruise the p-ways of The Pentagon at 2230 for hard-working Sailors to absorb into your collective of the undead) – but this is a totally different level.

    Riechers’s job highlights the Pentagon’s ties with Commonwealth Research and its corporate parent, which has in recent years received hundreds of millions of dollars worth of grants and contracts from the military, and more than $100 million in earmarks from lawmakers.

    Commonwealth Research and its parent company, Concurrent Technologies, are registered with the Internal Revenue Service as tax-exempt charities, even though their primary work is for the Pentagon and other government agencies. In a recent report Concurrent, also based in Johnstown, Pa., said it was among the Defense Department’s top 200 contractors, with a focus on intelligence, surveillance, force readiness and advanced materials.

    Concurrent’s top three executives each earn an average of $462,000. The company reported lobbying expenditures of $302,000 for the year ending in June 2006, more than double what it spent on lobbying four years earlier.
    And who did they buy with that money….
    But Marcus Owens, former director of the exempt organizations division at the IRS, said Concurrent and Commonwealth Research appear to be â€providing the sorts of services that are commonly provided by business organizations like Boeing and Lockheed Martin and others, and not charities.â€

    â€There are a lot of businesses doing this kind of stuff that are paying taxes,†said Owens, a partner at Caplin & Drysdale law firm. â€It makes me wonder what the charitable purpose is here.â€
    …
    A leading patron of Concurrent in Congress is Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), who represents the district where the company is based. Murtha, chairman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, announced the creation of the company in 1987.

    Ungh. Well, he is sooooo clean. This is where it gets ugly.

    Riechers is a decorated Air Force officer who retired in 2002. He joined SRI International, another nonprofit firm, as a senior technical adviser. From December 2002 to November 2006, he worked in a variety of Pentagon jobs while being paid by SRI International. In November, Riechers was nominated to be a senior acquisition official, taking the title last held by Darleen A. Druyun. She was sent to prison in 2004 after she left the Air Force for negotiating a job with Boeing while she worked for the government and for favoring the company in several procurement decisions.

    Now, where is my favorite Proverb? Oh, here it is; Proverbs 23:11,
    As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.
    The Good Book speaks the Truth.

    In the end, you cannot blame Riechers all that much. An offer was made to him that seemed normal in the swamp he lives in. Long ago that swamp needed to be drained. If we can’t drain the swamp because it is part of the DC power structure, at least we can let some light in now and then to show everyone what crawls around in the ground clutter. For that, we should thank the author of the article, Robert O’Harrow Jr. (WA Post)

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/…..icle/2007/ 09/30/AR2007093001402.html?sub=AR