Rep. Henry Waxman, chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, wants answers on the missing White House e-mails. Waxman released details of a study provided to his committee documenting 473 days of missing e-mails. Yet, yesterday, Bush spokesperson Tony Fratto yesterday announced that "we have absolutely no reason to believe that any emails are missing; there's no evidence of that." This issue shouldn't be so complicated. But it seems everytime we get a response from the White House, we get a different answer. Waxman's letters to the White House can be found here.

The Washington Post had a front page article on Waxman's efforts to get to the bottom of this:

The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional Democrat.

The 2005 study -- whose credibility the White House attacked this week -- identified 473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices, said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

Waxman said he decided to release the summary after White House spokesman Tony Fratto said yesterday that there is "no evidence" that any White House e-mails from those years are missing. Fratto's assertion "seems to be an unsubstantiated statement that has no relation to the facts they have shared with us," Waxman said.

The competing claims were the latest salvos in an escalating dispute over whether the Bush administration has complied with long-standing statutory requirements to preserve official White House records -- including those reflecting potentially sensitive policy discussions -- for history and in case of any future legal demands.