At a Congressional committee hearing in February, Theresa Payton, the chief information officer at the White House Office of Administration, testified that White House emails sent and received between 2003 and 2005 fell into a virtual black hole when the Bush administration transitioned from Lotus Notes to the Microsoft Outlook email exchange—a system that apparently was incapable of copying and archiving emails from Lotus.
For Congressman Darrell Issa, (R-Calif.), who sits on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and accused the committee’s Democratic leadership of trying to embarrass President Bush, Payton’s succinct testimony solved the mystery surrounding the disappearance of perhaps millions of emails, many of which are said to coincide with high-profile political scandals, such as the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, and a Supreme Court ruling involving Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force documents.
Issa stated unequivocally that Payton’s testimony confirmed that the missing communications were not the result of deliberate malfeasance by the White House or negligence by the administration’s technology staff, but simply a computer glitch that ensued when the White House wanted to phase out an archaic email program.
In an exchange with Payton, Issa characterized Lotus notes as “wagon-wheel” technology.
“I wouldn't want to do business with somebody still using Lotus Notes or still using wooden wagon wheels,” Issa responded. “If I understand correctly, though, certainly I checked with the House of Representatives, we can no longer support it for members who want to stay on it.”
In the far corners of the Internet where people engage in online discussions about computer-related issues and computer-related issues only, Issa’s characterization of Lotus Notes as a Betamax type of technology was the equivalent of blasphemy. Moreover, to suggest that a switch from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook is the reason that the White House cannot locate millions of emails shows a level of incompetence by Payton, the White House’s chief information technology officer, according to several email technology experts.
Shortly after the February 26 committee hearing, several users of Lotus Notes contacted Ed Brill, an executive at IBM who specializes in the Lotus Notes software, concerned that the way Issa and Payton characterized Lotus Notes would be bad for business if they continued using the software.
In a blog click here maintained by Brill, the IBM executive wrote that calls from users and “partners” of Lotus Notes became so “dramatic” and created such a terrible public relations problem for the company that he was forced to call Congressman Issa’s office and demand that he amend his testimony about Lotus Notes.
“The sequence of events that followed that was quite dramatic for me, even after 20 years in the industry,” Brill wrote in a March 23 blog post. “I ended up on the phone with [Issa]. I have received a letter from the Congressman, which I hope to publish in the next week or so. The hearing testimony will also receive an amendment clarifying the intent of the commentary about Lotus Notes.”
In a brief interview, Brill said he was not authorized to speak on behalf of IBM, but said he found it “suspicious” that the White House had not recovered “old data” prior to the switch from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook. He added that he could not provide me with a copy of Issa’s letter because it contained confidential information about Lotus Notes software. However, Brill said that Issa agreed to amend his testimony to reflect that “Lotus Notes is a viable product” and that he erred when he characterized it as “wagon-wheel” technology.
Issa’s office did not return emails or phone calls for comment.
These turn of events in the yearlong case of missing White House emails underscores a deep disconnect that exists between computer experts who believe Bush administration officials have either been incompetent in archiving presidential records or have knowingly destroyed the data to cover-up their actions, and officials like Issa and Payton who blame the implementation of new technology to explain the disappearance of the emails.
David Gewirtz, a former computer science professor who has written more than 600 articles about email and recently published a book on the email controversy, "Where Have All the Emails Gone,” believes administration officials including Payton have been playing fast and loose with the facts, particularly as it relates to the cost of recovering lost emails and the time it would take to retrieve it.
Gewirtz said Payton has misrepresented “the cost to manage data recovery by at least an order of magnitude” and has done so in an attempt to “dissuade Congress from pushing recovery.”
At the committee hearing in February, Payton pegged the total cost of recovery at about $15 million. In a sworn affidavit filed last week with U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola, Payton said the White House should not be forced to undertake a search for missing emails on individual computers and hard drives because it would be too time consuming and very expensive.
“That's just plain silly,” Gewirtz wrote in an article click here <click here published in the February issue ofOutlook Power Magazine.
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...
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Gustav Wynn (45 articles, 32 quicklinks, 5 diaries, 215 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.
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Mr M (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 995 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........
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Susan Nelsen (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 215 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.
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R.B. Ashworth (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 1 comments)
on Thursday, March 27, 2008 at 9:57:25 AM
