More Archiving Headaches for the Poor Bush Administration

/in /by

This time, with a judge telling them to go look again for those missing White House emails.

The United States District Court for the District of Columbia today granted the National Security Archive’s emergency motion for an extended preservation order to protect missing White House e-mails.  With the transition from the Bush Administration to the Obama Administration taking place in six days, and all the records of the Bush White House scheduled for a physical transfer to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) on that same day, the Court has directed the Executive Office of the President (EOP) to search all its computer work stations and has ordered EOP employees to surrender any media in their possession that may contain e-mails from March 2003 to October 2005.

“There is nothing like a deadline to clarify the issues,” said Archive Director Tom Blanton.  “In six days the Bush Executive Office of the President will be gone and without this order, their records may disappear with them.  The White House will complain about the last minute challenge, but this is a records crisis of the White House’s own making.”

Counsel for the Archive, Sheila Shadmand from Jones Day made clear: “The White House has been on notice since we filed our lawsuit a year and a half ago that they would have to retrieve and preserve their e-mail.  Instead of coming clean and telling the public what they have been doing to solve the crisis, they refused to say anything.  At this point, it is critical to preserve evidence that can help get to the bottom of the problem and prevent it from happening again.”

Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola has scheduled an emergency status conference today at 2 p.m. to consider additional measures that may be necessary to protect the records during the transition. (Courtroom 6 of the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse)

I can just see them now, the same folks who have been talking about their sacred duty to bury things for 12 years deliver all their documents to the National Archives, trying to explain how it was that they accidentally destroyed Scooter Libby’s hard drive and Karl Rove’s Blackberry.

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  1. oldoilfieldhand says:

    Is anyone watching Barney? I wouldn’t put it past this crew to say “the dog ate my homework”.

  2. Citizen92 says:

    No mention of the GWB43.com files sitting in the RNC’s attic (or on servers in Chatanooga) which are, by definition, Presidential (and Vice Presidential) Records. What of those? Into the 12 year lockbox? Into the fire?

  3. BlueStateRedHead says:

    And what are the consequences if they don’t find them?

    Will that enable us to go after the lowlying fruit like the lady who came over from Wachovia to watch ova you of the West Wing.
    Theresa Payton.

    And then testified to congress about how email systems necessarily overwrite earlier messages.

    I contributed her bio. We had a techn discussion of Notes and other programs. Really weedy, as can only happen here.

    it was in part:
    http://emptywheel.firedoglake……kup-tapes/

  5. jonL says:

    I realize this is not about archiving. However, will someone explain how in the hell DOJ can convene a Grand Jury for Roger Clemens and then turn around and not convene one for Schlotzman/

  6. AZ Matt says:

    Probably secret arrangements have been made to hide KKKarl’s blackberry on the next Mars bound spacecraft.

    • bmaz says:

      Hilarious. And you are dead on the money. Because, if not for the total bullshit House hearings done as a favor to George Mitchell because his little Mitchell report was being dismantled at the seams, there certainly would be no investigation of Clemens, much less the bastardization of due process they have ginned up and are still working on.

  8. JohnLopresti says:

    An article in October 2008 seemed to characterize the OH election canvassing servers as having been situated physically in the same room as the phantom Republican National Committee servers which lost so many emails which congress later subpoenaed, with little positive discovery in return. In the NatSecArch matter which the magistrate is to hear today, RNC simply could dispatch to PotusOVP the same courier which in 2006 lost 75 thumb drives enroute from Cuyahoga County OH elections office to the recount facility, the memory devices reportedly contained voting records from 1/7 of all precincts. If this technique is the instrumentality employed, likely, given the recent comments by the president concerning a similar event in 2003, there will be no unfurling of a breathless banner on January 21, 2009 pronouncing ‘Missing, Accomplished’.

  9. Citizen92 says:

    I think we need to be on the lookout for another one of these plays, too:

    January 19, 1993
    -President (George HW) Bush signs a secret agreement with Don Wilson, head of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), purporting to grant Bush exclusive legal control over the e-mail tapes of his administration. Working through the night, a staff team from NARA takes custody of thousands of tapes and disk drives, hurriedly removing them from White House offices to prevent incoming Clinton appointees from gaining access to them.

    See the memo here:
    http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/n…..930210.htm

      • Citizen92 says:

        And a few weeks later, Don Wilson was hired to be the Executive Director of the George HW Bush Library Foundation.

        The agreement was eventually invalidated by a federal judge.

        In the “does it sound familiar” category, compare today’s ruling by Facciola (and the underlying circumstances) with the state of play of electronic records in 1993:

        In January (1993), Judge Charles R. Richey of Federal District Court found that Mr. Wilson had violated the law governing Federal record keeping by failing to establish guidelines for the preservation of the electronic messages. Fearful that Bush officials would destroy the computer tapes, the judge twice ordered all the material to be preserved.

        http://query.nytimes.com/gst/f…..E%2FEthics

        And, with the Preservation order issued, the Bush-Wilson agreement in effect tried to limit access

        I’m wondering if Facciola and the NS Archive are trying to stay ahead of the fun and games this time — or if we’re headed for a replay.

        • bmaz says:

          If I am correct, that case was actually the genesis of the group we now know as the National Security Archive, which was the source of the email case behind this post.

        • Citizen92 says:

          Indeed…

          But on getting the underlying issue straightened out, we’ve come so far. /not

          Hopefully (at the very least) Obama’s people will take over the complex at 12:01 pm on January 20 with hard drives in computers. As a result of the overnight Bush-Wilson agreement in 1993, Clinton friends tell me they arrived to find the White House, West Wing, OEOB and NEOB offices in disarray, but most notably with hard drives absent from all the IBM PS/2 machines that were the standard back then.

        • readerOfTeaLeaves says:

          1993, Clinton… arrived to find the White House, West Wing, OEOB and NEOB offices in disarray, but most notably with hard drives absent from all the IBM PS/2 machines that were the standard back then.

          I’d like to think that at least a few enterprising reporters would pick up on this kind of info.

    • LabDancer says:

      Wasn’t Don Wilson that corpulent genial announcer guy on the Jack Benny show? ‘Don … oh Don! Look – – Don – I need some help here’

  10. jdmckay says:

    (…) the Court has directed the Executive Office of the President (EOP) to search all its computer work stations and has ordered EOP employees to surrender any media in their possession that may contain e-mails from March 2003 to October 2005.

    What a hoot.

    10:1 W’ spends more time typing up press release:
    kudn’t find any
    … than they do searching for the damn things.

    • Citizen92 says:

      Also, ahem, no mention of the Office of Vice President (OVP) as far as I can see…

      (…) the Court has directed the Executive Office of the President (EOP) to search all its computer work stations and has ordered EOP employees to surrender any media in their possession that may contain e-mails from March 2003 to October 2005.

      Remember, OVP is not an Agency, or a branch, etc, etc, etc.

  11. jdmckay says:

    From Nat Sec Archive today:

    At a hearing today concerning the risks posed by the presidential transition to the recovery of millions of missing e-mails from the Executive Office of the President (EOP) in the National Security Archive’s lawsuit seeking restoration of those e-mails, the White House acknowledged that it has done little to recover e-mail files from computer workstations and nothing to collect external media storage devices that could hold e-mails. These admissions came despite the issuance of a report and recommendation in April 2008 by a federal magistrate judge calling for the White House to locate and preserve data from the workstations and external media storage devices. Earlier today the court issued an order requiring steps to be taken to secure files from individual computer workstations, memory sticks, zip drives, DVDs and CDs.

    “The White House admitted it did nothing to stop people working in the White House from disposing of memory sticks, CDs, DVDs and zip drives that may have been the sole copies of missing e-mails on them,” stated Sheila Shadmand from Jones Day, counsel for the Archive. Ms. Shadmand warned: “We believe our ability to get a complete restoration of the White House record from 2003 to 2005 and evidence of what went wrong has been compromised.”

    The Archive’s Director, Tom Blanton noted: “If this kind of irresponsible conduct can take place despite the Executive Office of the President’s obligations under the Federal Records Act and this lawsuit, then perhaps the country needs more oversight of record-keeping in the White House.”

    Personally, court order or not, W’s crew doesn’t hand stuff over… they just don’t do it. Doesn’t happen. It’s no more likely than a Ass-dwelling-butt-monkey.

  12. BGPelaire says:

    One more case for the Obama DOJ. There must be some criminal liability for not following both rules and court orders. Oh, wait. If the President’s people do it, it must be legal.