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Friday, January 18, 2008

Conflicting statements in missing e-mail inquiry

By Rebecca Carr | Friday, January 18, 2008, 12:43 PM

Conflicting statements are being made in the inquiry into what happened to an estimated 10 million missing e-mails from White House officials between 2003 and 2005.

A an internal White House chart indicates that no e-mails were preserved for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005 for various units of the executive office of the president, according to Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.

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That contradicts what White House spokesman Tony Fratto said on Wednesday when he said there is no reason to believe any emails are missing.

Citizens For Ethics and Responsibility in Washington has posted the conflicting statements from the White House.

On Jan. 16, 2008: White House Spokesperson Tony Fratto stated: I think our review of this-and you saw the court filing on this and our declaration and response to the judge’s questions. I think, to the best of what all the analysis we’ve been able to do, we have absolutely no reason to believe that any e-mails are missing. There’s no evidence of that. There’s no-we tried to reconstruct some of the work that went into a chart that was entered into court records, and could not replicate that, or could not authenticate the correctness of the data in that chart. And from everything that we can tell, our analysis of our back-up systems, we just-we have no reason to believe that any e-mail, at all, are missing.

In contrast:

On April 13, 2007: White House Press Secretary Dana Perino admitted that there were email missing from between March 2003 and October 2005.

Perino stated: “What we have done is come forward to talk about the small slice of universe-small slice of the universe of the emails that we’ve identified that have the potential to possibly not be there. And, again, I think that one of the things that’s difficult is the things that we don’t know. We don’t know them, but we’re trying to find them out. And there are ways that you can retrieve any emails that are potentially lost.”

But what’s getting lost in the ruckus over the missing emails is the impact these emails have on historical records.

Federal law requires the preservation of White House records to provide a snap shot of the inner workings of the White House. The e-mails cover a time period when White House officials were under investigation for outing the identity of former CIA agent Valerie Plame and the nation confronted major challenges with the War in Iraq.

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