Waxman, Mukasey and Ten Million Missing Emails

By Matt Renner
Truthout

5 Dec 2007 // A government watchdog group now says ten to twenty million White House emails, which may contain information about the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's covert CIA status, have been destroyed by the Bush administration.

In a report from April, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) detailed a massive hole in the White House email records. The report, titled "Without a Trace: The Missing White House Emails and the Violations of the Presidential Records Act," accused the Bush administration of destroying "more than 5 million" emails and failing to attempt to recover them.

According to CREW, their sources now tell them the number of missing emails is probably between ten and twenty million.

Anne Weisman, CREW's chief counsel said the revised estimate "highlights that this is a very serious and systematic problem at the White House." Currently CREW, along with The National Security Archives are suing the Bush administration in an attempt to force the administration to restore the missing documents from backup tapes.

The missing email were discovered in the fall of 2005 when staff at the White House Office of Administration were attempting to respond to a subpoena from Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald for any White House records relating to the leak of Plame Wilson's identity.

The CREW report includes a letter from Fitzgerald that shows his investigation was hampered by problems with the White House email archiving system. "... we have learned that not all email of the office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system," Fitzgerald wrote in his letter to I. Lewis Libby's attorneys.

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