Perhaps they are following the tone set by this administration: if you don’t like the record you created, erase it. Yesterday, it was reported that Scott Bloch [0], the head of the Office of Special Counsel who himself is under investigation for improperly retaliating against employees and dismissing whistleblower cases with little or no examination, used an outside computer techie from “Geeks on Call” to do a “seven-level” wipe of his government computer hard drive. It just so happens that a “seven-level” wipe meets Defense Department security standards for making data impossible to recover.

Now we have learned that former Arkansas Governor and Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee [1] has also been charged with destroying government-owned hard drives when he left office last January. As these incidents show, there is little or no effective enforcement of record-keeping requirements at either the state or federal level.

CREW has been dogging White House efforts to destroy administration records and most recently convinced a federal district court judge [1] to issue a temporary restraining order against the White House for back-up copies of the millions of emails deleted from White House servers. The sad reality, however, is that if the electronic records have been successfully deleted there is little that can be done. In the case of the White House, we can hope that some back-up copies still exist; if not, efforts to hold White House officials accountable for their actions will be greatly impeded. CREW has already called on Congressman Henry Waxman, chair of the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, to consider amendments to the Presidential Records Act that would permit groups like CREW to sue to prevent an incumbent president from destroying his presidential records. As the most recent events make clear, even greater reforms are needed and, just as importantly, groups like the National Archives and Records Administration need to step up their oversight at the federal level.