Press

PRESS

May 25, 2010

Latest White House Blunder Highlights Continuing Problems With Bush-Era Email Restoration Process

The White House, Transparency, Press Releases

Washington, D.C. - Today, in a follow-up letter to Archivist David S. Ferriero, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the National Security Archive (the Archive) again requested that the Archive restore the entire collection of Bush-era missing White House emails using the backup tapes that are now in the custody of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). In an earlier letter, CREW and the Archive had forwarded to the Archivist the results of a comparison the White House conducted between the emails archived by the Bush administration for a 21-day period and the emails restored from backup tapes for that same period. The comparison showed an 83% discrepancy, suggesting 83% of Bush-era emails were not archived and would have been lost to history but for the lawsuits.

Suddenly, late last week, the White House advised CREW and the Archive it had just discovered a fundamental flaw in the comparison process invalidated the results. Despite weeks of discussions between the parties over the methodology the White House would use to conduct the comparison, the White House contractor inexplicably ended up comparing two sets of disparate data. In today’s letter, CREW and the Archive pointed out that this latest blunder caps off years of missteps stemming from flawed premises and methodologies. As a result, even if the White House redoes the comparison process as promised, it will be impossible to have any confidence in its findings.

Click here to read CREW’s and the Archive’s follow-up letter to Mr. Ferriero.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is a non-profit legal watchdog group dedicated to holding public officials accountable for their actions. For more information, please visit www.citizensforethics.org or contact Garrett Russo at 202.408.5565 or grusso@citizensforethics.org