The fix is in:
Older White House computer hard drives have been destroyed, the White House disclosed to a federal court Friday in a controversy over millions of possibly missing e-mails from 2003 to 2005.
The White House revealed new information about how it handles its computers in an effort to persuade a federal magistrate it would be fruitless to undertake an e-mail recovery plan that the court proposed.
“When workstations are at the end of their lifecycle and retired … the hard drives are generally sent offsite to another government entity for physical destruction,” the White House said in a sworn declaration filed with U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola.
It has been the goal of a White House Office of Administration “refresh program” to replace one-third of its workstations every year in the Executive Office of the President, according to the declaration.
Some, but not necessarily all, of the data on old hard drives is moved to new computer hard drives, the declaration added.
I am sure they will work hard to make sure a better system is in place for their Democratic successors. And sorry about all those e-mails you wanted. Accidents happen, you know.
daryljhusseinfontaine
The dog ate my homework. And then he got the textbook out of my locker, shredded it, and took a dump on the scraps of paper. Accidents happen!
ITMFA. Criminal prosecutions “happen,” too.
slippy hussein toad
What I’d like to see is that under the next WH, the email servers for the WH are stored in the offices of the Congressional opposition. They don’t get access to them, but they cannot be physically destroyed.
Also, the DELETE key is pried off of every WH keyboard. And the contact for that key soldered into a glob of nonfunctioning crap.
Or, maybe what we could do instead is simply PUT THE FUCK IN JAIL anyone who deletes an official government communication.
Dennis - SGMM
Not to worry; the Republicans will discover the danger of the Unitary Executive next January. They will also rediscover the other two branches of government and the importance of Congressional oversight. Any invocation of executive privilege or use of signing statements will be Viewed With Alarm. Presidential appointees will require super majorities to be confirmed.
It will take less than eight months for the Democrats to Let Victory in Iraq Slip From Our Grasp.
More financial institutions will require bailouts – not because of over leveraging or mismanagement but because they are demoralized at the specter of a Democratic administration. The punditocracy will speak with one voice in demanding that taxes be cut further and regulations loosened to end the Pelosi Recession.
This is too easy.
ed
Why wouldn’t They simply destroy all the evidence? What’s going to happen to them? Anything?
ThymeZone
Even the most rustic little government agencies, of which there are thousands in this country, know how to carry out retention plans and comply with retention policy.
It’s hard to know, or care, whether the White House’s inability to do such simple things is about incompetance, or low ethical standards. That’s a line they have manage to blur completely, by being incompetant, and by operating under low ethical standards.
tBone
No one could have anticipated that physically destroying hard drives would make it impossible to retrieve data from them. You loony leftist Monday morning quarterbacks should just STFU.
crayz
This is just complete bullshit. They not only destroyed the records of the emails off their mail servers, not only destroyed the backup tapes of those mail servers, but destroyed all the hard drives for all the workstations of their employees? And that when migrating an employee to a new workstation, the email data wouldn’t be one of the more important things to copy over?
They just go “here’s your new Dell, Mr Rove. Hope you didn’t want all those emails you had from the past 5 years that exist no where else in our system, because Solitare was all we copied off that old machine before throwing it in an incinerator”
Is that really what they expect us to believe?
LiberalTarian
You know, it took a while for rational people to realize that GW Bush was an emperor with no clothes, but today only a few knuckle dragging**, mouth breathing** 24%ers think he is some kind of snazzy dresser. Most people see this administration for the crooks they are.
Come next year, we are going to have a new Attorney General. I’m demanding prosecutions, big and small. Don’t forget the lessons of Rove–what gets repeated is what is believed. Repeatly call for prosecution, loudly, softly, quickly and slowly. Persistence is the key to justice.
Soylent Green
Yes and no. We can be sloppy with record keeping and security; how well our filing and retention plans are carried out depends on whose job it is and whether supervisors are doing theirs. When it gets fucked up it generally reflects incompetence but not malfeasance.
But the White House replaced its retention policy with a non-retention policy, and did a competent, bang up job of implementing it.
T. Scheisskopf
One-fodder-units go to jail with ease and facility, in the real world, when they destroy hard drives and data in legal situations like this.
Of course, anyone who has not yet figured out that we have two justice systems(one is opt-out, which is done with great amounts of money and the right lawyers and is for the right people, the other is a revenge/bread-and-circuses system) is just not paying attention.
Tim C
Replacing one third of your PCs each year is a standard management policy, as is destroying the hard drives of the out of service PCs. However it’s also standard practice to, if the person to whom the PC is assigned is still with the firm, to image the non-system data of the old HD to the new HD so that he has retained all his data. Now, if the person has left the firm, what you do with the data on the old HD is more subjective. Are you under any data retention rules or policies? At that point, these would come into play.
liberal
Tim C wrote, Replacing one third of your PCs each year is a standard management policy…
In a world where most people still use their computers for very simple tasks (email, word processing, web surfing, and simple spreadsheet manipulation), this is a waste of money, because it implies keeping a PC for only three years.
IMHO for most purposes a PC should last 5+ years, unless you’re gaming or doing something truly numerically intensive.
Might have to upgrade the RAM, of course. RAM’s dirt cheap, though.
ThymeZone
Our government agencies operate according to statute and court order. Non compliance is not an option. Auditors validate the compliance on a regular basis.
It ain’t rocket science.
Stooleo
I wish somebody would ask the candidates what their intentions are concerning the Bush administration’s law breaking. I’d love to see a bunch of these A-holes go to jail. BTW I think John Edwards would make a kick ass A.G.
David Hunt
No. The message is that they simply don’t care what we believe as they believe that they are beyond suffering any consequences from their actions. They’ve turned the DOJ into the loyal attack-dog of the Federal Govenment and are confident that it won’t turn on them. They simply ignore any attempts of Congressional oversight, effectively reducing Congress’ only choice to whether or not to start impeachment hearings. Of course, they’re confident that the Republicans in the Senate will vote the party-line that that the House knows that, so they’re not even worried about the process getting started. Thus, if the DOF is the family’s pit bull, Congress is the family’s battered spouse.
Xanthippas
I have never seen a strategy whereby the wrong-doer attempts to persuade the court of the lack of necessity of litigation because he destroyed all the evidence of wrong-doing. But then, things do seem a little bit more flexible up top.
Walker
The solution to this is very simple. Every single person who was responsible for for keeping these records should go to jail. This is clear obstruction of justice and they deserve time as someone’s bitch in lockup.
dslak
Fixed.
TenguPhule
jvill
Um, yeah, that’s nice, but so what?
A) Email is generally stored on servers not workstations (which might mirror locally), so workstation replacement has little to do with it.
B) If there was any semblance of an attempt at record maintenance, these systems would clearly be server-based, get backed up regularly, etc. There’s no way one could think the laws on record maintenance would be followed without these systems in place.
I just don’t understand how laws weren’t broken, either way.
Either there were no genuine efforts to back up these materials, which is a violation of the Presidential Records Act, or the materials relevant to a Congressional investigation were destroyed, which is… um, bad.
And even if we all lived on Pluto and all drives were destroyed accidentally, incompetence is an actionable offense. People are fired, jailed, professionally banned, sued, and publicly vilified for incompetence in other industries. Let’s not blame this one, yet again, on the system.
Who’s to blame? Let’s get some names and I want to see repercussions.
DougL
Mark my words. If this comes to pass next year, watch who’ll suddenly scream like stuck pigs at the outrage of using the Department of Justice for political purposes.
Soylent Green
What’s safer for the crooks in this administration? Shredding the evidence now and skating away, or leaving it intact to be used against them in later prosecutions for their greater misdeeds? Obviously the former.
Xenos
It takes work, and a system, to properly archive emails. Similarly, it takes work, and a system, to thoroughly destroy them, I don’t see how they could wipe out the servers, and the tape backups, and the old hard drives, and all the mirrored messages on all the current workstations, without a tremendous amount of effort and coordination.
And then there are all the messages which are public property that were sent over blackberries using servers owned and controlled by the Republican National Committe. And forwards sent to the DOJ, to State, to Senate and House members, etc.
And they are supposed to be doing this without leaving an electronic trail? No embittered, or mischievous, or patriotic techies to slip a few reels of tape in their briefcases, or backing something up off-site, and so on? What are they doing, setting up the biggest information purge ever using dixie cups and string?
There may be a lot destroyed, but all you need is a few incriminating emails, then you pull in people, start pulling on strings, and you can untangle a lot. Not everything, maybe, but enough.
I am just praying that they destroy enough so that they think are are safe and don’t start arranging for assassinations, or some other type of coup, against Democratic politicians in order to keep Republicans and certain corporate cronies out of prison. Not joking here.