Apparently On Some Days No E-Mails Were Saved At All, Waxman Letter Says

Thursday, August 30th 2007, 6:22 pm

By: News On 6

WASHINGTON (AP) _ A Democratic House leader asked presidential counsel Fred Fielding on Thursday to turn over a report first requested three months ago about the White House's problems with lost e-mail.

In a letter to Fielding, Rep. Henry Waxman set a Sept. 10 deadline for the White House to turn over information about the missing e-mail, a problem that apparently was discovered by administration officials in 2005.

The letter from Waxman, D-Calif., revealed new details about the issue that came from two White House lawyers who briefed Waxman's staff about problems archiving electronic messages. White House e-mail problems first came to light during a special prosecutor's investigation into whether someone on President Bush's staff illegally leaked a CIA agent's identity and again during congressional inquiries into the role of presidential aides in firings of U.S. attorneys.

At a May 29 briefing, Keith Roberts, deputy general counsel for the White House Office of Administration, said a review apparently found that on some days a very small number of e-mails were preserved and that on some days no e-mails were preserved at all, Waxman's letter stated.

An analysis by the White House Office of the Chief Information Officer summarizing these findings was presented to the White House counsel's office, said Waxman's letter, which requested the information by Sept. 10.

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said Waxman's letter is being reviewed and that the administration will respond ``expeditiously.''

At the May briefing, the White House staffers also reported that an unidentified company was responsible for daily audits of the e-mail system and the e-mail archiving process.

``Mr. Roberts was not able to explain why the daily audits conducted by this contractor failed to detect the problems in the archive system when they first began,'' wrote Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

During the May briefing, Emmet Flood, special counsel to the president, said he would consider the requests for a copy of the analysis presented to the White House counsel and for the identity of the contractor, Waxman's letter added.

The Presidential Records Act requires that White House e-mail be saved.

A private group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, is suing the White House Office of Administration seeking information about the missing e-mails. The Bush administration argued last week that the suit should be dismissed because Office of Administration records are not subject to public disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. The argument marks a reversal. In the past decade, the Office of Administration has responded to hundreds of FOIA requests.

In response to court orders in the case, the White House disclosed last week that it has located nearly 3,500 pages of documents about problems with its e-mail system.