On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid held a question and answer session with progressive journalists. Reid was asked about the FEC nominations and provided a very blunt answer:

Question: [W]hat do you foresee in general with presidential nominations going forward this session and particularly with the FEC?

REID: I've had private discussions with Bolten, Josh Bolten. I've had many things public in nature, in fact most publicly, we've exchanged a number of letters back and forth. Here's where we are now. We have three Democrats that we are happy to have on the Federal Election Commission. They have three Republicans they're happy to have on the Federal Election Commission. We will not let one of them be approved. His name is Von Splotsky or something like that. (Laughter) So they're going to have to make a decision, they're going to have to replace him or there will be no FEC. And they need it worse than we do. I will also say this, Mason had an uncharacteristic trait, he was fair. And I have tried to be fair in the people I choose to go on the FEC, for example Steve Walther, he's not even a Democrat, he's an independent. He's one of the Democrats on the Federal Election Commission. I think the Federal Election Commission is important, I wish it had more power, more teeth than what it has legislatively. But it still is a lot better than nothing. And the Republicans have always hated the FEC, but now when McCain needs something, they're rushing around trying to get something done. We'll do it our way or it won't get done.

Yesterday, CREW reported that the Bush administration admitted that it failed to preserve ANY backup tapes for the period March 1, 2003 through May 22, 2003, a period of time during which the U.S. went to war in Iraq.

Today, the Washington Post reported on the stunning admission -- and its implications: 

The Bush administration has not found disaster recovery files for White House e-mails from a three-month time period in 2003, according to court documents filed this week, raising the possibility that messages sent before and after the invasion of Iraq may never be recovered.

The White House chief information officer, Theresa Payton, said in a sworn declaration that the White House has identified more than 400 computer backup tapes from March through September of 2003 but that the earliest recorded file was dated May 23 of that year.

That period was one of the most crucial of the Bush presidency. The United States launched the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, and President Bush declared the end of major combat operations on May 1.

Payton and other officials said that older e-mails could still be contained on the tapes because of the way the files are dated.

The administration also said it is still searching computer archives for e-mails that have been filed in the wrong "digital drawer." In addition, Payton and other officials have said that any e-mails missing from the White House archiving system might still be available on disaster recovery tapes.

But that did not satisfy an advocacy group suing the administration for e-mail records.

"We're talking about the White House, and documentation of our history that may be lost," said Anne Weismann, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Administration officials had acknowledged last year that thousands of e-mails might be missing from White House servers, but the administration has shifted course in recent months to arguing there is still no clear evidence of a problem. A White House spokesman declined to comment yesterday.

Major development in CREW's lawsuit against the Bush Administration.

A White House declaration filed late last night in CREW v. EOP, CREW's lawsuit challenging the failure of the White House to preserve millions and millions of emails, makes the stunning admission that the White House failed to preserve ANY backup tapes for the period March 1, 2003 through May 22, 2003, a period of time during which the U.S. went to war in Iraq.

Previously disclosed documents by the House Oversight Committee had revealed that the White House also has no backup tapes for the period September 30, 2003, to October 6, 2003 -- a period that coincides with the Department of Justice opening up an investigation into the disclosure by top White House officials of Valerie Plame Wilson's covert identity.

Just as remarkably, the White House now argues that even with its own admission that critical backup tapes are missing, it should not be required to preserve ANY backup tapes because there is no evidence that any emails are missing. Of course, what the White House overlooks is that it has already told both the House Oversight Committee and Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald that critical White House emails are missing.

Below is the page of the declaration where the White House admits there are no backup tapes prior to May 23, 2003. The full declaration can be downloaded here.

An editorial in today's San Antonio Express-News advises the Bush administration to release the visitor records that CREW is requesting.  We concur:

The presidency is a powerful position, the most powerful in the world, powerful enough to withstand the disclosure of a visitors list.

President Bush would have you think otherwise.

President Bush is wrong.

White House lawyers, responding to a federal judge who had ordered the release of the list last year, contend the disclosure would erode the power of the office — a specious argument that merely enhances the view of this administration as closed and secretive.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the group seeking the list, does not want a transcript of the conversations between these visitors and the president and vice president.

If it did, the White House might have a case; instead, the group merely wants the list to determine how often prominent religious conservatives visited both the White House and the vice presidential residence.

CREW has been fighting the Bush administration's efforts to prevent the release of visitor records for the White House and the Vice Presidential mansion. We maintain these are public records and a federal district court judge agreed with us. The Bush administration is appealing -- and we'll be in the Court of Appeals today opposing them again:

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington wants to use the Secret Service documents to show the influence religious conservatives have on the Bush administration. The government argues that proves the records are related to the White House, not to the workings of the Secret Service, and should not be released.

"The prospect of each and every appointment record immediately becoming the subject of forced public disclosure would surely cast a chill over the ability of the president and vice president to collect information and advice," Justice Department lawyers wrote in court documents.

CREW lawyers reject that argument. They say the documents shouldn't be considered White House records simply because a watchdog group is trying to find out what the White House is up to. The Secret Service created and controlled the documents, the lawyers said, so they should be public.

Nearly two dozen news organizations, including The Associated Press, filed court documents supporting the release of the Secret Service logs.

Major development in CREW's lawsuit against the White House Office of Administration. 

Following an on-the-record conference call on March 28, 2008, District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued an Order on March 30, 2008 in CREW v. Office of Administration, ordering the Office of Administration (OA), a White House component, to produce documents and information related to its decision that it is no longer an agency subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). 

Judge Kollar-Kotelly agreed with CREW that documents showing when OA determined it was no longer subject to the FOIA and the Federal Records Act are relevant to determining whether OA is an agency and therefore is required to respond fully to CREW's request for documents relating to OA's discovery in the fall of 2005 of millions of e-mails on White House servers.

The documents can be found here. 

Breaking News this afternoon from the Associated Press:

The White House says an aide to President Bush has resigned because of the alleged misuse of grant money from U.S. Agency for International Development.

Presidential spokesman Scott Stanzel says the former aide, Felipe Sixto, had been a special assistant to the president for intergovernmental affairs. Stanzel said Sixto was promoted to that position on March 1 and that he came forward on March 20 to tell his superiors about the alleged wrongdoing.

Stanzel said it involved improprieties involving the use of grant money and Sixto's former employer, the Center for a Free Cuba. Stanzel says the matter has been turned over to the Justice Department.

As we enter the final months of the Bush administration, secrecy has been a dominant and consistent theme.  CREW knows that firsthand.  We've been trying for years to pry information that should be public from the Bush administration.  The Political Animal at the Baltimore City Paper expounds on the subject:

Lawsuits by the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington forced the disclosure of a letter from a lawyer for Vice President Dick Cheney that instructed the Secret Service to destroy any evidence of lists of people who visited Cheney at his residence next to the Naval Observatory. At the same time, reporters who attempted to find out when and how many times now-convicted felon Jack Abramoff visited the White House were stonewalled with vague and general answers, first denying the lobbyist visited, then claiming he was just one of many people the president saw, and then maintaining a concerted effort to hide any photographic evidence that the president ever met with the influence peddler. By the time photographs leaked out, the news media's attention had since moved on to other things, and the outrage that might have come out of it was muted.

The Bushies again unveiled this tactic, to gum a story to death, last week, after a federal judge gave the administration three days to produce evidence about what happened to millions of e-mails that were supposed to have been archived 2003 to 2005, during the start of the war in Iraq all the way through the response to Hurricane Katrina. Last Friday, the administration, in a sworn declaration, said that old hard drives are thrown away, and that some but not all of the information on them is moved over to new computer storage.

When the final book is written on the Bush administration, its policy on information could be summed up like this: They hid it, they denied it, and then they threw it away.

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.

Another development in CREW's lawsuit against the Bush administration over missing White House emails.  This is important:  Key facts are conspicuously missing from the White House declaration filed with the Court.

CREW filed a reply brief in support of its motion to show cause why a number of White House officials should not be held in contempt in CREW v. EOP. CREW has requested that the Court hold the defendants in civil contempt based on their filing a false, misleading and incomplete sworn declaration to answer four questions posed by the Court.  The documents in the case can be found here.

In response, the White House argued in part that it met its obligations simply by the filing of a declaration and that any falsehoods were "wholly irrelevant" to the Court's four questions, aimed at determining whether the preservation order should be broadened.

CREW once again pointed out that the White House's response that the back-up copies are complete and should contain all the missing emails is demonstrably false. CREW also noted its understanding that back-up tapes created prior to October 21, 2003, are not readable and therefore could not be used to find OVP email in response to a subpoena from Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald.

These facts are also conspicuously missing from the White House declaration filed with the Court.