Henry Waxman recently issued a pointed Letter, with a Sept 10th deadline. Henry is demanding an Administration explanation for there latest "Dog ate my Homework" excuse.
Their latest excuse blames a
"contractor [who] failed to detect the problems in the archive system when they first began."
Funny thing is the White House CAN'T or WON'T identify this Contractor, either! ...
Here's Waxman Letter, demanding to find out the "Name of the Dog" who "Lost those Emails":
[emphasis is added]
110th Congress of the United States
House of Representatives
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
HENRY A WAXMAN, CALIFORNIA -- CHAIRMAN
Mr. Fred F. Fielding
Counsel to the President
The White House
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. Fielding:
Last week, in an apparent effort to keep the public from learning the extent of missing White House e-mails, the White House took the unusual position that the Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Because Congress also has an interest in this issue, I am writing to request information about the reports that millions of emails may have been lost from the White House e-mail system.
On May 29,2007, Keith Roberts, the Deputy General Counsel of the White House Office of Administration, and Emmet Flood, Special Counsel to the President, briefed Committee staff on the White House e-mail system and the missing e-mails. At the briefing, Mr. Roberts informed Committee staff that the White House had discovered in 2005 that an unknown number of e-mails may not have been preserved in the White House archive, as required by the Presidential Records Act.
According to Mr. Roberts, the Office of the Chief Information Officer then conducted a review of the e-mail system to determine the scope of the potential loss. He said that this review apparently found some days with a very small number of preserved e-mails and some days with no e-mails preserved at all. He also stated that a report summarizing these findings had been presented to the White House Counsel's office.
In addition, Mr. Roberts informed the Committee that an unidentified company working for the Information Assurance Directorate of the Office of the Chief Information Officer 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.
At the conclusion of the briefing, Committee staff requested a copy of the analysis presented to White House Counsel and the identity of the contractor responsible for daily audits and archiving. Mr. Flood told Committee staff that he would take the two requests under consideration. Since then, Committee staff have repeatedly requested that the White House provide this information without success. Given that three months have passed since your office first received this request, I am writing to ask that you provide the information to the Committee by September 10, 2007.
The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is the principal oversight committee in the House of Representatives and has broad oversight jurisdiction as set forth in House Rule X. An attachment to this letter provides additional information on how to respond to the Committee's request.
If your staff has any questions about this request, they should contact David Rapallo with the Committee staff at (202)225-5420.
Sincerely,
Henry A. Waxman
Chairman
http://oversight.house.gov/...
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http://oversight.house.gov/...
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Non-Compliance with the Presidential Records Act IS a very serious issue! This Act was the DIRECT result of the Richard Nixon obstruction of justice charges. It was designed to PREVENT similar abuses in the future (like NOW).
Our Corporate Media may be "asleep at the switch" about this stonewalling of Democracy, but thankfully there are still some Media groups in the UK who still do real reporting! They know a real News when they see it:
Guardian Unlimited UK
Thur Sep 6, 2007
Group sues White House over email
James Orr and agencies
A private firm today filed a lawsuit claiming the White House illegally abandoned an automatic archiving system for its email in 2002.
The legal move, taken by National Security Archive (NSA), a group advocating the public disclosure of government secrets, is the latest attempt to find out whether the Bush administration lost millions of electronic messages.
...
Both the National Security Archive lawsuit and the one filed by Crew cited hundreds of days between March 2003 and October 2005 from which White House emails were missing.
"[It] covers the period beginning with the Iraq war until the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina - it doesn't get more historically valuable than that," Tom Blanton, the director of National Security Archive, said.
The organization's legal action, filed under the Administrative Procedure Act, is seeking a federal court order directing the White House to recover any emails that were deleted from servers and currently exist only on backup tapes.
Unless the electronic messages are retrieved from the backup tapes, the records "may be lost forever," the suit says.
The Federal Records Act and the Presidential Records Act say White House emails must be preserved.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
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Who is National Security Archive (NSA)?
The National Security Archive, an independent non-governmental organization based at George Washington University, brought the original White House e-mail lawsuit (which included a wide range of scholarly, library and public interest co-plaintiffs) against Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. That lawsuit produced landmark rulings in the early 1990s that e-mail had to be treated as government records. Those rulings led to the preservation of more than 30 million White House e-mail messages from the 1980s and 1990s.
http://www.gwu.edu/...
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I first started following this story last spring -- thanks to Representative Waxman's "dogged efforts" to "Get to the Truth"
(Waxman, Leahy, and Conyers, are True Patriots! They deserve our attention and support, in their many efforts to rescue, defend, and restore the Constitution from those would treat it just like "another email to be shredded"!
Here is a quick review of why these Missing Emails are SO important:
Waxman To RNC: Turn Over Your Emails
April 4, 2007
http://thinkprogress.org/...
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RNC's lost Emails = Watergate's 18 missing minutes
by jamess -- Sun Jul 29, 2007
Includes: MOST SERIOUS BREECH OF PRESIDENTIAL RECORDS ACT IN HISTORY!
JUNE 18, 2007 by KEITH OLBERMANN
AND a discussion of how these missing Emails are Violations of The Presidential Records Act and the The Hatch Act.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
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And what those missing emails certainly show, would be numerous co-ordinated violations of the Hatch Act, committed by Rove and his direct staff, as I documented here:
Rove's Travelling Roadshow -- coming to a Gov't Office near you
by jamess -- Sun Apr 29, 2007
http://www.dailykos.com/...
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GOOOO Waxman! (and Leahy, and Conyers too)
Please restore "Transparency in Government" once again!
AND Let the Chips fall where they may!
(WE the People are behind you, we got you're back -- even if the Corporate Media doesn't)