The Bush/Cheney White House has “lost” almost a years worth of e-mail, and aww, gosh-darnit, it just looks like they won’t be able to recover them:
The White House is missing as many as 225 days of e-mail dating back to 2003 and there is little if any likelihood a recovery effort will be completed by the time the Bush administration leaves office, according to an internal White House draft document obtained by The Associated Press.
The nine-page outline of the White House’s e-mail problems invites companies to bid on a project to recover the missing electronic messages.
The work would be carried out through April 19, 2009, according to the Office of Administration request for contractors’ proposals, which was dated June 20.
Last week, the White House declined to comment on the document.
On Wednesday, the White House refused to talk about internal White House contracting procedures, but said the information is “outdated and seriously inaccurate.” It would not elaborate. The White House also declined to say whether it has hired a contractor for the work yet.
Such a terrible loss, and I hope no one tries to make political points out of this. It is just an accident that all these emails from a time when all sorts of extremely sensitive internal discussions were taking place just “disappeared.” Only a real leftard would assume malice.
MMM
ITMFA!
John Harrold
How hard is this? I have almost every email I have sent and recieved (not including spam) since 1998 (and a lot of stuff before that). I know these folks get a lot more email than I do, but is it really that hard back this stuff up? Don’t they hire folks whose only responsability is make sure this kind of stuff get’s taken care of? This is such utter BS it’s laughable.
wasabi gasp
Its all good, just as long as they still have all of mine.
John Cole
The best part of the article that I did not quote is their failsafe. They won’t tell bidders hiow much data is lost, instead telling them it could be 25, could be 250 days, so no one can make an appropriate bid because the range is just too high.
Pretty fucking awesome.
nightjar
I mean, it’s not like these common emails are something important, like say travel office records gone missing as the intrepid Travel Office Vets For Truth remind us.
And I bet you didn’t know we have the Travel Office Truthers. They will Swift Boat you in a Karl Rove minute with the hammer of lethal Wingnuttery.
Brachiator
These are the same goofballs who misplaced the Constitution. By comparison, this is small potatoes.
The ghost of Dick “18 minute gap” Nixon must be laughing his ass off right now.
JackieBinAZ
Seems like that’s exactly what happened.
Tom65
Halliburton will get the no-bid contract to recover the data. The end.
Incertus
I’ll bet they can find every email that makes Scott McClellan, Paul O’Neill and Richard Clarke look bad, though.
MikeEss
“Don’t they hire folks whose only responsability is make sure this kind of stuff get’s taken care of?”
…of course. When you tell Luca Brasi to get some help with a problem, you expect things will be taken care of…
BTW, anybody look to see if there is a Rosemary Woods working for IT at the White House?…
Louise
And then the first Obama staffers to try and use e-mail will be electrocuted.
bartkid
Here is proof-positive that America is no longer #1, technologically.
Where are America’s 15-year-old hackers who could find this stuff in an afternoon and have it all on /. before they ran out of Mountain Dew?
It is so sad.
Ripley
They’ll probably hire Carly Fiorina to spearhead this project, so no worries!
daryljhusseinfontaine
Yeah, I’d be willing to bet there is a subset of folks who would absolutely contract out to do it for free, so long as there were zero contractual constraints on relinquishing recovered data for potential prosecution.
D
thomas
Rosemary Woods did this from the great beyond. She’s definately updated and expanded her skill set.
Besides, IOKIYR
Brother Flaming Taser of Warm Reason
O/T: Goldfart PWNED
On Topic:
That data is not lost, it could be recovered. Hell the FBI and other “Law Enforcement” agencies have the tools, as does the average large size company, to recover the data. The only way it is ever truly lost is if the Hard Disk’s are destroyed, they’re magnetically wiped, or the disk was formatted at a high level. What bullshit.
rachel
Ergo the data was not lost; it was sabotaged.
But we knew that already.
Jim
Why don’t they just ask the NSA, they’ve been recording the Internet since them…….
flyerhawk
That’s pretty amusing. Every brokerage firm in America is required to maintain a copy of every single email for at least 7 years, and does so. But the United States government manages to lose 2/3 of a year’s worth of emails?
Willful incompetence.
MikeEss
“Willful incompetence.”
…it’s not incompetence if the loss of data was intended…
Gus
I think the ghost of Tricky Dick is just lamenting the fact that he was born 40 years too early.
MikeEss
“I think the ghost of Tricky Dick is just lamenting the fact that he was born 40 years too early.”
If it was Nixon instead of George Bush Jr., Nixon would have already appointed himself dictator for life, and it would be easier to name off the countries we hadn’t bombed into submission than the ones we did.
OTOH, we’d never have heard a peep from Cheney — the Padawan is always respectful and deferential to the Master…
TenguPhule
Just declare the whole admin guilty, slap them all against a wall and open up with a machine gun for maximum efficiency.
MikeEss
“Just declare the whole admin guilty, slap them all against a wall and open up with a machine gun for maximum efficiency.”
That’s nasty and uncalled for.
Having a Truth and Reconciliation Commission and having their morality and judgment publicly exposed is a good start. We can evaluate further when the facts are known…
Bokonon
Oh … this is just more lies and distortions by the Liberal Media!!! Who are consumed with Bush Hatred!
How dare they impugn this wonderful man? Mistakes happen! Why, major corporations trying to avoid prosecutions make the same sort of goof all the time!
Um …
Didja know that Al Gore said he invented the Internet?
David Hunt
They’ve all been outsourced to those “black” prisons in Eastern Europe.
pseudonymous in nc
Since the archives are The Property Of The Motherfucking United States Of America, one assumes that Congress can appropriate whatever funds necessary for the Archivist to have an accurate record, no?
I can’t wait for John Boner to urge legislation to ensure that records of the Obama White House are CC:d to his office for safekeeping.
sheila
Uh I thought you could never totally eliminate emails or documents on a computer. That there was always some way that some techie person could get to deleted stuff. Monica Lewinski’s computer, anyone?