Bush E-Mail Mystery Deepens: White House Won't Name Tech Contractor August 31, 2007 11:20 AM
The White House will not identify a private company which appears to be involved in the disappearance of potentially millions of White House e-mails.
The company was responsible for reviewing and archiving White House e-mails, a White House official told congressional staff in May, according to a letter yesterday from House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif. Congressional investigators asked then for the name of the company and "have repeatedly requested" the information since then, according to Waxman.
They are still waiting for an answer, the chairman wrote to White House counsel Fred Fielding. Waxman asked the White House to come up with the company's name by Sept. 10.
White House spokesman Scott Stanzel declined to tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com the company's name or explain why the White House would not provide it to Congress.
"We are reviewing Rep. Waxman's letter and will respond expeditiously," Stanzel said in an e-mailed statement.
According to the White House, as many as five million e-mails may not have been properly archived and may be lost forever, in apparent violation of the Presidential Records Act. The post-Watergate law states that communications relating to official activity in the offices of the president and vice president are owned by the American public and cannot be destroyed.
The unnamed firm "was responsible for the daily audits of the e-mail system and the e-mail archiving process," Waxman said a White House briefer had attested in a May meeting.
The firm worked for the Information Assurance Directorate, under the White House chief information officer, Waxman said he was told.
In addition to requesting the firm's name, Waxman's staff has also asked to see a White House report which detailed the days on which few or no e-mails were archived; the White House has been similarly unresponsive to that request, Waxman charged, and asked it provide the document by Sept. 10 as well.
User Comments are we really surprised??? no email, no paper trail..... do people actually think the white house would allow any entity, other than itself or these private contractors that they refuse to name, to have prying eyes look into the illegality of some of the emails and who sent them to whom, etc.... I think not!
Posted by: txtorilvr | Aug 31, 2007 11:36:58 AM
Folks... the Sh*t is about to hit the fan....
Posted by: bush-is-guilty | Aug 31, 2007 11:37:26 AM
Oh, okay then. Sorry to have bothered you Mister President Sir.
Posted by: C. J. Anderson | Aug 31, 2007 11:54:02 AM
But you see, we will never see any Pres records. They will make sure they never see the light of day.
Posted by: Rani | Aug 31, 2007 11:56:17 AM
As someone who worked in the tech industry for many years, the idea that millions of offical government emails would somehow be "lost forever" is ridiculous. No amount of gross incompetence can explain the meticulous, deliberate, and repeated steps needed to erase data which is copied or "mirrored" in real time onto multiple servers located in different geographic locations. Archived files are further protected by off-site and offline storage separate again from all of the above. The odds of all these databases being "accidentally erased" are less than zero by multiple decimal points.
Posted by: h5mind | Aug 31, 2007 11:56:42 AM
How convenient - Doesn't it make you wonder what the Bush Regime is up to and what they are trying to hide? They still think most of us are plain stupid. Didn't Karl Rove claim to loose his emails also? This excuse is getting really old.
Posted by: peter | Aug 31, 2007 11:58:37 AM
Unbelievable but not a surprise! This republican administration has to be one of the most corrupt in history.
Posted by: jarheadmike | Aug 31, 2007 12:00:03 PM
Politicians are like fighting siblings....bicker, b*&%$ and bicker some more! Shred them like Hillary Clinton and the Clinton administration or just archive them eternally lost....some things are just not meant to see to read by the public eye. Maybe that is why I can still sleep at night. That is where they get the saying...."Ignorance is bliss." We voted them into the office. Let them do the job that we hired them to do and if we dont like it in the end.....DONT RE-ELECT THEM!
Posted by: Sleeping soundly | Aug 31, 2007 12:00:47 PM
Even Nixon was more honest and had more class than Bush.
Posted by: gman | Aug 31, 2007 12:01:21 PM
The government can see our's but they wont show us their's. Same old thing. Unintelligent people are running the country.
Posted by: gman | Aug 31, 2007 12:03:40 PM
The White House is full of crooks, liars, and thieves and Congress and the Senate are full of cowards and collaborators. Terrorism isn't a tiny fraction of the threat to this country that Bush, Cheney, Rove and the Republican AND Democratic leaderships are. Our rights are stolen from us in the name of "protecting" us. Our money, our childrens money, and our grandchildrens money are diverted into the pockets of a select few who grease the palms of our elected leadership. We need to start at the top with Bush, Cheney, and company - remove them from office, try and convict them of the treason they've commited on the American people. From there we need to go straight down the lines of the Republican and Democrat leaderships and through the "big business" crooks they've sold us out to. Try, convict, and execute the lot of them - after taking what they've stolen and returning it to the people.
Seriously.
Posted by: Neal | Aug 31, 2007 12:04:11 PM
Hmmmm. How damned convenient. I wonder if those die-hard Bush fans will still believe he is so wonderful now?!?!
