The MoJo Blog took a look at the revelation from late last week that the White House destroyed computer hard drives.  CREW is suing the White House Office of Administration over missing emails.  Our counsel, Anne Weismann wrote a post about the 'extraordinary degree to which the White House has ignored, if not outright flouted, its record keeping obligations."  The MoJo Blog's analysis confirms Anne's analysis:

When computers are replaced, it is fairly standard practice to destroy the hard drives of the old computers, particularly if they contain confidential information (as the White House hard drives almost certainly did). But it is almost unheard of for a hard drive to be destroyed if no backup of the data it contains exists. The White House is required by law to preserve all federal records, a category that includes much of its internal email correspondence.

This is an important point: destroying hard drives is common practice; permanently destroying data is another matter. It's highly unusual. If the White House knew there was even a chance that the hard drives were the last repositories of the missing emails, it must have realized it might be irrevocably destroying data it was compelled to preserve.

It's likely the White House knew of problems with its archiving system while it engaged in its normal practice of replacing computers. As Mother Jones reported last month, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) told the White House on January 6, 2004 that it was "operating at risk by not capturing and storing messages outside the email system." Documents released at a House oversight committee hearing last month reveal that the White House knew of a "critical security issue" with the archiving system in 2005. And a 15-person team of administration employees created a report in 2005 that pointed to some 700 days for which there was a suspiciously low amount of archived email (for about 400 of those days there was no archived email at all). On April 13, 2007, Dana Perino, the White House Press Secretary, said "I wouldn't rule out that there were a potential 5 million e-mails lost."

It's pretty clear White House officials knew there might be a problem with missing emails as early as 2004. But the "refresh" program continued. (A similar program to "recycle" backup tapes was stopped in October 2003—but only after the backup tapes for March-October 2003 had already been overwritten). Since it would be obvious to any IT professional (of which the White House has many) that the hard drives being erased were a potential source for recovering missing emails, any good faith effort to recover that information and ensure no more was lost would include a temporary halt to the "refresh" program. That didn't happen.