White House Political Emails "Erased"
The White House is claiming that emails sent and received by staffers using Republican National Committee accounts (in itself a possible violation of law regarding the Presidential Records Act) have been erased and are, conveniently, lost forever.
White House spokesman Scott Stanzel admitted that the White House "has not done a good enough job overseeing staff using political e-mail accounts to assure compliance with the Presidential Records Act," by not ensuring emails be archived. But get this, he claims that up until 2004 political emails on RNC servers were automatically erased after 30 days and then even after they changed that policy some staffers deleted their OWN emails from time to time. Bullshit. It's time to call in some forensic IT geeks to recover this data. Seize the servers and start digging.
UPDATE: Patrick Leahy seems to agree with me. From the AP this morning:
"You can't erase e-mails, not today. They've gone through too many servers," said Leahy, D-Vt. "Those e-mails are there, they just don't want to produce them. We'll subpoena them if necessary."
Comments
Those emails are probably hiding out with those elusive WMDs and that $10 billion in funds for Iraq that just "went missing."
Posted by: JML | April 12, 2007 11:53 AM
Insurance regulations require regular backups to be kept and stored offsite for even the smallest companies. Someone will get a Congressional Medal of Freedom for this eventually.
Posted by: IT Guy | April 12, 2007 2:28 PM