[THS] 22 million missing Bush White House e-mails have been found

[Peter Webster]

22 million Bush White House e-mails reportedly found

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2009/12/22-million-bush-white-house-e-mails-reportedly-found/1


Two groups say 22 million missing Bush White House e-mails have been found, the
Associated Press reports.

Update at 3:25 p.m. ET: The e-mails had been mislabeled and effectively lost,
according to the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the
National Security Archive (NSA), which announced a final settlement of their lawsuits
against the executive branch. The 22 million e-mails were found or reconstructed
from disaster recovery backup tapes.

The Obama White House will restore 94 calendar days from backup tapes.

CREW explains:
The dates for restoration were chosen based on email volume and external events
because there simply was not enough money to restore all the missing emails. In
addition, the EOP will continue to provide CREW and the NSA with records
documenting the missing email problem, the response of the Bush White House to
that problem, and the options the Bush White House considered for preserving
electronic records, but inexplicably rejected.

The NSA first sued the Bush White House in 2007 to recover 5 million missing e-mails.
CREW revealed in 2008 that the White House had discovered the problem in the fall
of 2005.

The lawsuits accused the Bush administration and the National Archives and Records
Administration (NARA) of taking no action after it was revealed that millions of e-mails
went missing from White House computer servers for 2? years. The Bush White
House also knowingly kept using a broken system to preserve electronic records.
"We now know that many poor choices were made during the Bush Administration
and there was little concern about the availability of e-mail records despite the fact
that they were contending with regular subpoenas for records and had a legal
obligation to preserve their records for the nation's long term historical memory,"
Meredith Fuchs, the NSA's general counsel, said in a statement. "We have been
briefed on the system in use since the beginning of the Obama Administration and
we believe that the system now in use fixes the significant problems with the prior
system, including by capturing everything, properly categorizing the e-mails, and
preventing unauthorized deletion."

Read the terms of the agreement.
The Obama White House has already produced thousands of pages of documents
relating to these issues. CREW has posted them here.
(Updated by Michael Winter)