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CREW Posts More Previously “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 had marked as “sensitive,” meaning they were not subject to public disclosure. The documents were originally assembled by the Bush White House as potentially responsive to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request CREW filed seeking documentation of the missing email problem.

Several of the newly-released documents involve the email management system the Bush White House put in place after discovering the missing email problem in October 2005. Although the Bush administration was aware of numerous problems with how the old system managed electronic records, particularly email, the documents show the new system failed to fix many of these problems.

The documents suggest the Bush White House was relying on the implementation of an anticipated comprehensive electronic records management system called ECRMS as a long-term solution. As a result, it viewed the system it put in place after discovering the missing email problem as only a short-term solution. One White House official said of the new system, the “idea is NOT to spend too much effort to develop a highly automated, highly functional [system] since we need something soon and it’s lifespan should be short.” OAP00001481. ECRMS, however, was inexplicably cancelled in late 2006, leaving the Bush White House with only the ad hoc system never intended to be long-term solutions.

Although the Office of Administration (OA) made some improvements in preserving email in late 2005 and early 2006, the documents show even those improvements were riddled with problems. A January 2008 analysis concluded the system for capturing and storing statistical information about the PST files “employs a very manual set of processes and is highly error-prone.” OAP00026473. The processes for validating that PSTs were properly created and correcting any errors were also “highly manual,” leaving open the possibility “that incorrect or incomplete information is provided to the end user.” OAP00026473. In addition, the program that was supposed to automatically move messages from Journal mailboxes to PSTs files, called Mail Attender, sometimes failed to move all the messages. OAP00004585. As a result, OA needed a standard operating procedure (SOP) to verify every week that no messages were left in Journal mailboxes.

Previously-disclosed documents reflect these and other problems. An April 2007 review found many procedures still “entail manually intensive tasks” that were “applied inconsistently,” at least during contractor and staff turnovers. OAP00005033. Moreover, the PFMS database of PST files “was not completely maintained” and needed to be updated to support search requests, calling into question whether the database provided a full inventory of PST files for the White House to search in response to subpoenas and FOIA requests. OAP00005049.

In response to these continuing problems, OA launched another effort in December 2006 to re-analyze the record keeping processes. This review resulted in a formalized series of SOPs in the spring of 2007 for creating, maintaining, and tracking email records. OAP00004555.

The documents also raise more questions about custom-designed software OA’s contractor developed to gather information about the contents of the PST files called the PST Inventory Verification & Investigation Tool (PIVIT). The Bush White House used the database, along with a statistical analysis tool called ARIMA, to narrow the universe of days with missing emails and decide which days to restore from backup tapes. The contractor’s design document for PIVIT, however, raises serious questions about the database’s reliability. Because the project had to be completed very quickly, the contractor could not properly test it to verify it could handle all the data at once. OAP00004818. Moreover, because the system was supposed to be run only once, important features “such as logging, descriptive error reports, and user interface will not be implemented.” OAP00004818.

Previously-disclosed documents show the database had serious flaws. A “quality check” of PIVIT by another contractor found 279 PST files that were not in the PIVIT database. OAP00004908. Later, OA found another 125 PSTs that were not in the database. The quality check also recommended a manual examination of some PST files that appeared empty to see if they actually contained emails. OA, however, rejected this recommendation, saying it would not “invest more resources in Phase 2 due to these findings.” OAP00004909. In addition, the PIVIT software kept changing throughout the process of deciding which days had low email counts. This caused the statistician who created ARIMA to ask OA what had been “done to assure that PIVIT is really working as intended” and warn “ARIMA is only as good as the input data.” OAP00004914.

Other newly disclosed documents provide more details about the problems with the Bush White House’s attempts to use ARMS, the electronic record keeping system set up by the Clinton administration to preserve Lotus Notes emails to archive email created in Microsoft Exchange. One document lists numerous problems with one system, called the Exchange Interface System, including that it would not process some emails, put the wrong time stamp on messages, failed to sort some emails by White House component, exhibited “quirky behavior” at times, and did not have clear SOPs. OAP00026707.

The failure of this and another attempt to use the Clinton-era system led the White House to develop ECRMS. The newly-disclosed documents provide additional background information about the planned ECRMS design. OAP00025275, OAP00025539.

Finally, one document describes the procedures for verifying the validity of email searches as of October 2004. OAP00016501. If followed, the procedures should have helped insure the validity of the White House’s responses to subpoenas, including those issued by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald in the investigation of the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert CIA identity. Notwithstanding those procedures, any searches could not have been complete because of the missing email problem.