“We're talking about mounting a tape or a disk and running a program,” Gewirtz wrote. “You can buy an IT guy for nearly a year for $50,000. But if it takes that IT guy a full year to run one restore, that's a dude you need to fire. Also from the Wildly Exaggerated Claims Department, Payton said it would cost $500,000 to buy the servers to do the restores. That's quite off the mark. I just checked with the Dell site. A nice PowerEdge server with 4GB of RAM and four one-terabyte hard drives is $4,377. A half a million bucks will buy you 114 of these servers.”
Additionally, Payton stated in response to a show cause order issued by Facciola that the White House had a “refresh policy” that resulted in the destruction of its hard drives every three years “in order to run updated software, reduce ongoing maintenance, and enhance security assurance.” As a result of this policy, Payton said, any emails that are missing would unlikely be found.
It is unclear when the “refresh policy” was implemented or who was responsible for drafting it. Neither Payton nor her aides responded to repeated requests for comment.
Susan Cooper, a spokesman for the National Archives, said in an interview that her agency does not have any power to enforce the White House to comply with the Presidential Records Act.
“One thing you have to remember the key thing to remember about presidential records is that it doesn’t become ours until the end of the administration,” Cooper said. “The National Archives does not have any say or legal input until the end of a president’s term. It’s up to the president to decide how he manages his records. However, federal records are a different story. We have input into that immediately. If we believe a federal agency is violating the Federal Records Act we will write a letter to the agency and ask for an explanation and if necessary we will refer the case to the Justice Department.”
Allen Weinstein, Archivist of the United States, said the National Archives did write a letter to the White House last May when reports about the extent of the missing emails began to surface.
“Because the [Executive Office of the Presdient] email system contains records governed under both the Presidential Records Act and Federal Records Act, on May 6,2007, the National Archives sent a standard letter to [ Alan R. Swendiman] the Director of the Office of Administration requesting a report on the allegations of unauthorized destruction of Federal records,” Weinstein told the House Oversight Committee in sworn testimony last month. “While we have not received a written reply to the May 6 letter, we have been diligent in requesting an update on the status of the White House's review of these allegations and the possibility of missing Federal and Presidential emails, the White House has responded regularly that its review is still continuing. Furthermore, we have made our views clear, both to the White House and to this Committee, that, in the event emails are determined to be missing, it would be the responsibility of the White House to locate and restore all the emails, probably from the backup tapes, and that such a project needs to begin as soon as possible.”
Cooper indicated that the National Archives has no intention of referring the matter to the Justice Department.
However, Terry Sweeney, a columnist with InformationWeek, believes that is where the case should end up.
In a column click here <click here published Monday, Sweeney said Payton’s disclosure involving the destruction of hard drives “sounds improvised—very lately improvised.”
“Normally, a reasonably sensible storage professional makes sure all necessary data was properly copied,” Sweeney wrote. “And normally new applications -- whether it's an e-mail server or the backup system for it are tested and re-tested before anything gets destroyed. But this situation isn't normal, and the story behind the story keeps changing, or getting added to, like one of those serial chain letters that clutter your inbox. Earlier on, I was willing to give the White House and [chief information officer] Theresa Payton the benefit of the doubt about this mess. My suspension of disbelief about this is officially suspended.”
George Washington University’s National Security Archive, who, along with government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sued the White House last year. The watchdog organizations allege Federal Records Act violations and have asked a federal court judge to order the Bush administration to install an effective archive system and retrieve the lost emails.
In a court document filed late Tuesday responding to the White House’s show cause order, the National Security Archive said that Facciola should order the White House to immediately make a “forensic copy” of individual hard drives or “there is a high likelihood that email data will be obliterated.”
“That the [Executive Office of the President] has destroyed hard drives from the relevant period, does not monitor or track its own hardware, and has no guidelines in place for the retention or preservation of other media devices further affirm the need for this court to ...protect these sources of media that the [Executive Office of the President] itself has chosen to callously neglect,” the NSA’s response to the White House’s show cause order says.
In a sworn declaration accompanying the NSA’s court filing, Al Lakhani, Managing Director at Alvarez & Marsal Dispute Analysis and Forensic Services, said it is highly unlikely that “all emails sent or received between March 2003 and October 2005 are not on backup tapes” as Payton claims.
However, the emails can be recovered if copies of the hard drives are immediately made, Lakhani said, adding that it would cost between $50 and $250 and take up to 30 minutes, far lower than the $15 million Payton projected.
Jason Leopold is editor of the online investigative news magazine The Public Record, http://www.pubrecord.org, and the author of the National Bestseller, "News Junkie," a memoir. Visit www.newsjunkiebook.com for a preview. He is also a two-time winner of the Project Censored award, most recently, in 2007, for an investigative story related to Halliburton's work in Iran. He was recently named the recipient of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation's Thomas Jefferson Award for a series of stories he wrote that exposed how soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have been pressured to accept fundamentalist Christianity.
The Bush Administration is just trying to get to the finish line using a labyrinth of runaround and stall tactics.
We've known since the Gonzales hearings that sensitive emails were missing. The fact that computers and hard drives weren't and still aren't being confiscated means the wheels of justice are gummed.
Congress is afraid to enforce Congressional oversight. Why? Perhaps the NSA program was eavesdropping on Bush's political enemies and he has a juicy red file on each of them? I'd love to be proven wrong...
by
Gustav Wynn (59 articles, 38 quicklinks, 5 diaries, 281 comments)
on Wednesday, March 26, 2008 at 11:25:30 AM
Everything ... the corrupt courts, the corrupt congress, the corrupt justice dept., the corrupt media, the corrupt judges, shall I go on?
Can you say "Dog & Pony Show"?
I knew you could ...
I can remember back to the "missing 18 minutes" from the Nixon Tapes and it didn't take 1/100th of the time for congress to act and Special Prosecutors to be called, but the powers-that-be learned their lessons well since those days and everything they've done since has been designed to never let justice and the law get in the way of their criminal activities again - that's "progress" for you.
I really hate to say this but we've crossed over the line a long time ago where anything resembling a fair and just government exists in this country. It's simply a shell of it's former self. Criminals that have infested every branch and level of our so-called government have looted it dry and use whatever means at their disposal to hide their crimes and they have plenty of help along the way. We don't have government servants anymore, we have vultures feeding off the carcass of a dead experiment in democracy.
This one case is so eye-rolling obviously a cover-up for larger crimes as to insult the intelligence of even the dimmest among us, yet they persist with straight faces telling these blatant lies. I can only give them kudos's for their self composure for not breaking-out laughing as they spew them. And I have equal contempt for the American people in sitting silently by as they these cretins laugh at us for our inaction.
For I don't really blame the criminals any more. They're just doing what criminals do. I place most of the blame on Mr. John Q. Public. For it has bee obvious now for a long time that we can not count on our government for anything and to not rise to the occasion is to be complicit in everyone of these crimes.
I can tell you this - the time is soon approaching where this illusion will fail and the rest of the world won't be kind to us as we've been to ourselves. In the end justice will prevail, but it won't be coming from our end when it does and there will be no mercy giving anyone of us.
by
Mr M (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 12 diaries, 1418 comments)
on Wednesday, March 26, 2008 at 4:11:15 PM
those "emails" do not belong to Bush and the GOP..they belong to the people, the citizen taxpayers who paid for the damn computers and hard drives.....Bush and his minions have no right to destroy them with out our permission........
by
Susan Nelsen (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 267 comments)
on Wednesday, March 26, 2008 at 1:35:08 PM
What is disgusting and upsetting to me, and makes me angry about this particular situation is that other than Mr. Leopold's article(which I found "on line"), I have not seen nor read or heard a word reported by the mainstream media with regards to the vast number of missing emails.
In my opinion, just another in a long, long list of examples of how the main stream media is failing to do it job and likewise failing to fulfill it's responsibility in giving the general public much needed information as to how this Prez. and the W/H are thumbing their noses at the judicial system and consequently majority of the American public are unaware of just how this administration is abusing its powers.
by
R.B. Ashworth (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 1 comments)
on Thursday, March 27, 2008 at 9:57:25 AM
4 comments
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