As we all know, there are numerous troubling aspects of the search for and analysis of documents provided to the Judiciary Committee by the Department of Justice in the USA investigation. Based on my, admittedly belated, review of the documents furnished to the committee, I sense we are using 19th Century tools to investigate a 21st Century case. Here are three observations that I've not been able to find elsewhere:
- If the committee is only getting printouts of the emailed correspondence, it is missing some important additional information (and potentially very interesting names) that would be available in an electronic version of the messages. (Examples after break)
- Many, or most, of the email copies appear to come from the printouts in individuals' file drawers instead of a search through archives or hard drives. Are the White House and DoJ restricting their searches to file drawers? (Explained below)
- Most significantly, one of the emails released on March 23 to the committee contains evidence that a system was in place to preserve email dating back to 2003 and that those archives still exist, or at least did exist through March 2007. (Explanation after break)
1. What's missing from the printed versions: Emailers often hide some recipients of email by using a "Blind copy" mode. Other recipients, thus do not know that a copy of the email was also sent to Karl Rove, for example. The electronic version of the originating email message would disclose the hidden recipients. But, the printed versions typically list names of senders and receivers, but do not disclose these hidden recipients. The electronic versions can, in some instance, also provide information about the route the email took when traveling from point a to point b (what servers were used). The Web of RNC communications may be even broader than we might suspect.
Printouts typically do not disclose what email system is being used by the sender -- often just listing a name instead of the actual address. There may be other persons using non-federal email systems.
2. Where are these copies actually coming from: There are bothersome aspects to the copies (at least as they exist on the Judicial Committee Web site). There are two reasons that make me wonder if the DOJ and White House are only focussing on printouts located in file drawers instead of exhaustively pursuing data from other digital sources. First, there are contemporaneous hand-written notes on many of the pages -- notes that would not exist on printouts made directly from a database. Second, there are many instances in which the printouts contain threads of messages by multiple parties in the conversation thread. If one were doing a comprehensive search for all email, the individual messages would also be surfacing in addition to the aggregated emails. Is the DOJ restricting its search to printed and filed documents? Is the committee asking for the right medium for getting full and complete disclosure (print versus electronic).
3. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus: I reference the bottom of page seven of the Judiciary Committee records marked "DOJ Document Set 3 Released on 3-23-2007" Page seven discloses archive system
At the bottom of an July 2003 email sent by Dan Collins to William Moschella and Dan Bryant (plus whatever blind copy recipients), is the kind of footer that should have been on most of these documents if they were retrieved from backup/archival media. But this is the only one I found. The footer lists the source of the information as "https://vault/enterprisevault/properties.asp?VaultID=1D9B3Df254D3F3A41A8EF7C1284" followed by the date the material was accessed and printed. The first part of that string indicates it was retrieved from a secure, local server. "Enterprisevault" undoubtedly refers to the large corporate-level email archiving system built by Symantec. What's especially interesting is that the retrieval date is March 15, 2007 (although the date is difficult to read in the Judiciary Web pages) and that the document itself was written in July 2003. So, DOJ was using a system that preserved at least some email going back to 2003. What is this archival system? What are it's archival procedures, and is it being used for a comprehensive sweep of correspondence. Were the RNC laptops backedup?
The blanket requests for document issued by Waxman and others, needs to be worded in a way that the committee gets more than print copies and also seeks some clear understanding of what data is actually available in an electronic form.
We may be in a Watergate-type situation, were the congressional investigation was jumpstarted when relatively low-level staffers disclosed the White House taping system. We need someone with a conscience in the White House or DOJ who can tip us off to where the best data really exists.