Press

PRESS

CREW Posts More Preivously “Sensitive” Missing White House Email Documents

Washington, D.C. - In CREW v. Executive Office of the President, CREW’s lawsuit regarding the millions of emails missing from Bush White House servers, the White House recently released more documents it previously said could not be released to the public. The documents, assembled by the Bush White House as potentially responsive to CREW’s Freedom of Information Act request seeking documentation of the missing email problem, originally were marked “sensitive” by the White House, meaning they were not subject to public disclosure. CREW has objected to the White House’s overuse of the “sensitive” designation, and repeatedly pressed the White House to reconsider its decisions keeping important documents from the public. The White House recently agreed some of the documents should not have been designated “sensitive,” and released versions of these documents with the designation removed.

One of the previously “sensitive” documents released confirms the Bush White House failed to take action on a 2005/2006 plan to use backup tapes to restore hundreds of days of missing email, and shows the plan would have cost a fraction of what the White House eventually spent on restoring far less email (OAP00026112). Part of the document is a May 10, 2006 memo describing the analysis that identified the hundreds of days of missing email and listing four options for restoring them from backup tapes. The option for restoring all of the missing days would have cost about $2.4 million, according to the memo. A handwritten note attached to the memo states that while the plan was presented to the White House Counsel, the Office of Administration General Counsel, and the Department of Justice, it “was never approved so we never did it.” Only after CREW revealed the missing email problem in April 2007 and reported the Bush administration’s failure to act on the original restoration plan did the White House take any action. By the end of the Bush administration more than $10 million had been spent on the restoration process, and the Obama White House has spent millions more on it.

Another formerly “sensitive” document, a February 2005 PowerPoint presentation, includes a prescient discussion of federal records management at the White House from before the missing email problem was discovered in October 2005 warning that the “inadequate” records management system risked records being “improperly destroyed” (OAP00032599). The presentation supporting a proposed records management plan described the then-current state of federal records management at the Executive Office of the President as inadequate, out of date, non-compliant, undocumented, and having a “make it up and you go along approach.” The primary risks of the system, the presentation asserted, included illegal records disposition, the destruction of records needed to be preserved, accusations of unauthorized destruction, the inability to locate records, congressional inquiries, negative media attention, and costly litigation. The presentation correctly diagnosed many of the system’s flaws, and again demonstrates that while at least some at the White House were aware of the system’s flaws and the serious risks of not addressing them, the Bush administration failed to take steps necessary to prevent the loss of millions of emails.

Other previously “sensitive” documents released by the White House include documents related to efforts to restore from backup tapes email from the Vice President’s office in response to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s subpoenas in the investigation of the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert CIA identity (OAP00016482, OAP00026701).

An earlier separate release of documents by the White House includes another PowerPoint presentation, this one from June 2004, noting that the process for searching for emails was difficult because the White House inconsistently named the files in which emails were stored (OAP00033077). It was later discovered that hundreds of these files were misnamed. This earlier release also includes journals and handwritten notes of White House employees gathering information about the extent of the missing emails and attempts to improve the system (OAP00033137, OAP00033170) and more documents describing efforts to search email in the Vice President’s office (OAP00033070, OAP00033123). Numerous documents in this release are marked “sensitive.”