White House Destroyed Hard Drives That May Have Contained Missing Emails

from Mother Jones

The White House has responded to a judge's order asking it to explain why it shouldn't be required to make copies of all of its hard drives to ensure the recovery of missing emails by claiming that many of the relevant hard drives have been destroyed. You read that correctly: the White House position is "We don't have to preserve hard drives containing missing email because we already destroyed them."

"[T]he vast majority of computer workstations used during the relevant time period would have been replaced approximately every three years in connection with this refresh program," writes Theresa Payton, the Chief Information Officer of the White House Office of Administration (OA) in her declaration to the court.

This latest revelation appears to present a major obstacle to the efforts of two non-profits, the National Security Archive (NSA) and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which are suing to recover what may be up to 10 million missing emails and to ensure no more are lost. (Need to catch up? Read our full coverage of the missing White House emails story.) If the original hard drives exist, even deleted emails can probably be recovered from "slack space" on each hard drive, although the passage of time makes that process harder. But according to Payton's declaration, when the White House removes old machines, it usually only copies "active data" to the new machine. Any previously deleted emails or archive files would then be unrecoverable. This means it may be virtually impossible to dig up emails from March to October 2003, a period that is not covered by White House backup tapes.

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