White House Agrees to Restore Lost E-mails

UPDATE

The White House has agreed to restore 94 days worth of e-mails that vanished during the Bush administration, a liberal watchdog group announced today.

Under a settlement announced Dec. 14, the Obama administration said it will rescue the missing e-mails from backup files, then send them to the National Archives and Records Administration for storage. It will also produce several boxes of documents relating to failures in the White House e-mail system and the Bush administration’s response to those problems.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sued the Bush White House after it learned that potentially millions of e-mails from between March 2003 and October 2005 had disappeared. The public interest group accused the administration of failing to take action to retrieve the e-mails or to establish an appropriate electronic record-keeping system.

Anne Weismann, chief counsel for CREW, said the e-mails will be separated into presidential and federal records collections, and that they could become accessible to public records requests.

“There is the hope of public access, while, without restoration, there wouldn’t have been that hope at all,” Weismann said. “They would have been gone forever.”

After the announcement, Senate Judiciary Chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) issued a statement condemning the Bush administration's handling of the e-mail controversy:

“The Senate Judiciary Committee never accepted the Bush administration’s conclusion that millions of its emails were ‘lost.’ In fact, President Bush’s spokesperson was dismissive of congressional requests that the administration recover the emails. This was another example of the Bush administration’s reflexive resistance to congressional oversight and the public’s right to know.”

Comments

[NikkoA]

Regardless if you support the current administration or not it's hard to overlook these past tyrant behaviors dubbed 'patriotic'. These guys will never serve a day in their pathetic lives - too many high fives and handshakes that many think they already know. Too bad the American public is too concerned over partisan lines to see the pathetic 'negations' special interests are making on behalf of all of us.

Sad thing is all these guys go to the grave convinced they did the right thing...

Even an uneducated child can comprehend the basic rights being forfeited. Grow up America!

[Dave Abbott]

Wow. Great news! Al Qaeda can do a FOIA instead of waiting for the New York Times to sift through and publish cherry-picked portions of them.

I wonder how much of this is an end run around executive privilege, which I believe still exists. I'll bet the current administration thinks it does, too -- when it applies to them. Oh, they have already done that (in the face of criticism from Sen. Byrd, W.Va.) by using the Czar appointments to skirt Congressional oversight and public scrutiny (cf. BLT 02/25/2009).

Oh, that's right. He also claimed privilege over the party crashers.

Someone should share the following wisdom with the President: What goes around comes around.

[gwazdos]

Maybe then maybe we can put Karl Rove and Dink Cheney in jail for the War crimes?

[Tom Parris]

Congratulation on pursuing the witchhunt Chairman Obama.

Viva Obama! Viva Fidel! Viva Hugo!

Socialism is the gift that keeps on taking.

[Guy Lauten]

Uh oh. I expect Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby will be a bit worried about this. It will be interesting to see what they have to say about it.