CREW's Charge

13 Apr 2007 // And it may not be just the RNC e-mails that are missing.

Michael Kranish writes in the Boston Globe that "an independent group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. . .said unnamed sources told the group the White House had conducted an internal review that estimated that more than 5 millions e-mails may be missing.

"Anne Weismann, the chief counsel for the citizens group, said in a telephone interview that many e-mails were lost because the White House did not put in place a system for archiving them after it dropped one that had been used by the Clinton administration.

"'They didn't keep a backup,' Weismann said. 'There was no way to ensure they were not modified or deleted in some way.'"

Kranish also notes: "The fact that e-mails are missing was noted -- but not widely and publicly noticed -- in the perjury trial of Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby.

"In January 2006, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald sent a letter to Libby's lawyer that noted that 'we have learned that not all of the e-mail of the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process of the White House computer system.'"