Just one more injustice from our commander in cheat...
washingtonpost.com
By George Lardner Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 2, 2000; Page A21
White House officials early last year were expecting to be questioned by Congress about the administration's failure to save thousands of e-mail messages and were preparing an expensive plan to reconstruct them in light of numerous subpoenas demanding that they be searched, according to an internal memo.
Congress, however, didn't ask the questions and the White House took no action to recover the records until this March, when the Justice Department launched a criminal inquiry into the mishandled correspondence and House lawmakers began hearings.
The White House yesterday raised the possibility it may invoke executive privilege to keep Congress from seeing some documents in the controversy over missing e-mails, the Associated Press reported yesterday.
The White House sent the House Government Reform Committee a one-page list of documents it is not turning over under subpoena because they are considered covered by executive privilege and attorney-client confidentiality.
The documents include handwritten notes by White House lawyers involving their discussions with computer experts about the e-mails, the AP reported.
White House spokesman Jim Kennedy said in an interview last night that the White House was not asserting executive privilege but trying to reach an agreement with the House committee to avoid a showdown on seven documents. He said the documents were related to how to respond to the inquiry.
An internal White House memo dated Feb. 5, 1999, which the committee does have, laid out the history of the e-mail breakdown as part of a set of talking points that could be used in case the subject came up at congressional appropriations hearings on last year's budget request.
The author of the memo, Karl H. Heissner of the White House Office of Administration, wrote that the White House had asked for a proposal "to recover the missing records" from backup tapes in late 1998, and on Oct. 20, 1998 received a report from Northrop Grumman Corp., which operated the e-mail system.
The "approximate cost of system design is $602,000," Heissner said in his memo to a White House colleague, Dorothy E. Cleal.
White House Counsel Beth Nolan said in House testimony on March 23 that the Office of Administration was faced at the same time "with the massive task of Y2K compliance of its entire system, including its mail systems," and that effort gobbled up all available resources. She said the $602,000 estimate was for "a feasibility study alone."
The White House has now embarked on a $3 million effort to recover the missing e-mails from backup tapes and to search the hundreds of thousands of messages for any relevant evidence that should have been produced in response to criminal, civil and congressional investigations of the Clinton administration.
Heissner's memo also dealt with a second issue concerning information requests from Congress and "litigants against the Government." He indicated that the requests in 1998 had not been that burdensome and appeared to be declining in 1999.
As a result, he said, "we may not want to call attention to the issue. . . . Last year's hours consumed by . . . staff amounts to only a little over 500, this year's hours consumed so far amount to only 50, and the level of requests appears to be declining.
"Let sleeping dogs lie," Heissner concluded.
Kennedy said the "let sleeping dogs lie" remark was an apparent reference to how much time was being spent on information requests and not the e-mail problem.
"We have seen no documents that suggest there was any effort to keep information about e-mails from Congress," he said.
In his memo, Heissner, who is scheduled to testify before the House Government Reform Committee Wednesday, traced discovery of the e-mail glitch to February 1998, when the White House official responsible for archiving e-mail messages, Daniel "Tony" Barry, was unable to find correspondence that should have turned up in response to a records search.
Barry informed others at the White House, and then-White House counsel Charles F.C. Ruff was told of the problem in June 1998. Ruff, who is scheduled to testify Thursday, has reportedly said he did not realize the scope of the problem. According to Nolan, Ruff thought the missing e-mails were simply electronic duplicates of messages that had already been printed out in the Monica Lewinsky case and examined for relevant evidence.
Heissner said it took until Nov. 20, 1998 "before the correction was made by Northrop Grumman."
The White House denies any wrongdoing. Lawmakers, Justice Department investigators and independent counsel Robert W. Ray are trying to determine whether the failure to retrieve the records amounted to obstruction of justice.
So far the most explicit criticism has been directed at Barry because of an affidavit he signed on July 9, 1999 in connection with litigation brought by Judicial Watch. In it, Barry said that since July 1994 "e-mail within the EOP [Executive Office of the President] system . . . has been archived" automatically. He did not mention any gaps.
Staff writer John Harris contributed to this report. |
