Watchdog Publishes Missing White House E-Mails

CREW, based in Washington, D.C., released a statement Wednesday that summarizes some of the information found in 105 files containing newly released records that the group claims support its charges against the Bush administration. CREW reports that it received the documents it published Wednesday after negotiations with the Obama administration.

While the newly released files are heavily redacted and represent "a small percentage of the promised records," according to CREW, the group claimed that "the documents confirm Bush White House officials knew they were failing to properly archive records and made several attempts to develop an e-mail archiving system" but that "the efforts were either unsuccessful or abandoned for unexplained reasons."

Here are some more highlights from CREW's assessment of the newly released records:

-- The White House discovered that millions of e-mails had disappeared in October 2005.

-- E-mails subpoenaed from Vice President Dick Cheney's office as part of the Valerie Plame Wilson leak investigation were among the missing e-mails. CREW reports that the Office of the Vice President "had particular problems with missing e-mails."

-- After moving from IBM Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange in 2002, the White House attempted several times to develop a comprehensive archiving system for Microsoft-generated e-mail, but never built a complete system.

-- Microsoft, in a February 2004 assessment report on White House e-mail search issues, recommended the White House move off the Automatic Records Management System (ARMS) that was built to archive Lotus Notes e-mail. As of that date, according to Microsoft, "there is no current mechanism to transfer Exchange e-mail into ARMS."

-- There exists a set of contracts with IT vendors and solution providers from June 2003 that appears to be part of a project to build a long-term e-mail archiving solution for the White House called the Electronic Communications Records Management System or ECRMS. Oddly, the ECRMS contracts name the "requisitioning office" as the Executive Office of the President and order products be shipped to the White House's Office of Administration (OA) -- but list the "issuing office" as the Department of the Interior's Mineral Management Service.

-- The contracts include a $32,213 deal with content management software vendor Documentum, which was acquired by EMC in December 2003, and separate deals with a pair of private IT contractors. Silver Spring, Md.-based Symbiont had a $52,419 contract to provide the OA with network cabling infrastructure, while McLean, Va.-based Booz Allen Hamilton had a $1.1 million deal to build the ECRMS.

-- At least one e-mail refers to an "emergency change" to the system for generating tabulations of White House e-mail files, or PST files, while another discusses "unauthorized actions" taking place.