White House email: my dog ate it
First, there's this:
The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional Democrat.
[...]
The internal study found that for Bush's executive office, no e-mails were archived on 12 separate days between December 2003 and February 2004, Waxman said. Vice President Cheney's office showed no electronic messages on 16 occasions from September 2003 to May 2005.
Archived e-mails were missing from even more days in other parts of the White House, the analysis found. The Council on Environmental Quality and the Council of Economic Advisers, for example, showed no stored e-mails for 2 1/2 months beginning in November 2003. The Office of Management and Budget showed no messages for 59 days -- including the period from Nov. 1, 2003, to Dec. 9, 2003 -- and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative showed no e-mail for 73 days.
The lame excuse given by the chief information officer in the White House Office of Administration amounts to the presidential equivalent of "my dog ate it:"
[Theresa] Payton also disclosed that e-mail backup tapes were routinely "recycled" during the first three years of the Bush administration. The White House stopped the practice in October 2003, when it "began preserving and storing all back-up tapes," Payton said.
Payton attempted to spin this "routine" recycling of backup tapes as an accepted best practice in the industry. However:
An e-mail technology expert disagreed.
"The best practice is to archive and store everything in a system that's searchable for e-mail and kept in an orderly and organized way," said Rurik Bradbury, vice president of strategy for Intermedia, which runs e-mail systems for a quarter of a million companies.
"In the financial industry and the accounting and law fields, there are federal and industry regulations which require them to keep all e-mail for a period of many years in a separate archive, and that archive has to be searchable," said Bradbury.
Destruction of federal records is a criminal offense:
Requirements for industry and government are different, with stringent requirements for preservation of federal and presidential records. The Federal Records Act contains criminal penalties of up to three years in prison for destruction of government documents.
It is unfortunately no surprise that the Bush White House considers criminal activity to be a "best practice."
Regime change begins at home, folks.