WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration, siding with former President George W. Bush, is trying to kill a lawsuit that seeks to recover what could be millions of missing White House e-mails.
Two advocacy groups suing the Executive Office of the President say that large amounts of White House e-mail documenting Bush's eight years in office may still be missing, and that the government must undertake an extensive recovery effort. They expressed disappointment that Obama's Justice Department is continuing the Bush administration's bid to get the lawsuits dismissed.
During its first term, the Bush White House failed to install electronic record-keeping for e-mail when it switched to a new system, resulting in millions of messages that could not be found.
The Bush White House discovered the problem in 2005 and rejected a proposed solution.
Recently, the Bush White House said it had located 14 million e-mails that were misplaced and that the White House had restored hundreds of thousands of other e-mails from computer backup tapes.
The steps the White House took are inadequate, one of the two groups, the National Security Archive, told a federal judge in court papers filed Friday.
"We do not know how many more e-mails could be restored but have not been, because defendants have not looked," the National Security Archive said in the court papers.
"The new administration seems no more eager than the last" to deal with the issue, said Anne Weismann, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the other group that sued the EOP.
The Executive Office of the President includes the president's immediate staff and many White House offices and agencies.
Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, noted that President Barack Obama on his first full day in office called for greater transparency in government.
The Justice Department "apparently never got the message" from Obama, Blanton said.
The department defends the government when it is sued.
I'm starting to think maybe Duchess had it right. I originally just assumed Obama actually believed all that shit about the country not being able to survive the rule of law being applied equally instead of just to the bottom 90%, and us needing to look forward instead of back, and so going out of his way to cover up Bush's crimes. But now I think maybe Obama really does want to keep and use all that power the Executive Branch accumulated under Bush. That scares me a lot more then him just being a naive idiot.
I’d expect this is in large part to protect his democratic buddies from being inplcaited on all the stuff Bush is now known to have done. The nation didn’t get this screwed up with them just sitting uninvolved while Bush ran amok.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
Although isn't it reasonable to expand the executive power during an economic crisis? Correct me if I am wrong but I thought FDR also has considerable executive power during the great depression?
Humans are such funny creatures. We are selfish about selflessness, yet we can love something so much that we can hate something.
A perfectly predictable move; humans love power, hate giving it up.
And yet, and yet.
The department most politicized in the Bush years was the DOJ. Take that, with it's blatantly political tests for hiring for eight years, add in the tactic of any president's loyalists burrowing, and you wonder if they got the memo and burnt it.
Probably wrong.
Manic Progressive: A liberal who violently swings from anger at politicos to despondency over them.
Out Of Context theatre: Ron Paul has repeatedly said he's not a racist. - Destructinator XIII on why Ron Paul isn't racist.
I fail to see where the article provides proof that the new administration is attempting to kill the lawsuit.
What I see is that the former administration didn't keep back-ups properly, and no one can find some of the missing e-mails.
I don't see anything saying that the new administration has asked the case / problem to be tossed out.
I see claims that they are not moving on the issue. But you know what, political advocations and activists say that on anything and everything they dont' immediately get their way on.
And then there is another issue: Data Recovery.
Even if the will existed to find those e-mails, it may not be possible. (If Data Recovery was that easy, well, I wouldn't have had to restart one of my project 3 (censored) times.)
The physical storage medium those missing e-mails might be on may either;
a)- may never have existed (no back ups where made)
b) - no longer exist / been destroyed (accidently or deliberately)
c) - simply failed or become corrupted (it happens)
d) - have been mislabeled / misplaced.
e) - May have been found, but contain classified information that can't be released at the moment. (i.e names of operatives currently undercover come to mind).
That being said, if someone provides me with proof that the new Administration is trying to kill the lawsuit, not simply having problems with the investigation (either deliberate or out of their control), I'll happily join in pointing the finger. Otherwise, this is simply more of the political screaming that comes part and parcel with the US having elected, and then re-elected, Cimpus Caesar + co.
I've been asked why I still follow a few of the people I know on Facebook with 'interesting political habits and view points'.
It's so when they comment on or approve of something, I know what pages to block/what not to vote for.
Solauren wrote:That being said, if someone provides me with proof that the new Administration is trying to kill the lawsuit, not simply having problems with the investigation (either deliberate or out of their control), I'll happily join in pointing the finger. Otherwise, this is simply more of the political screaming that comes part and parcel with the US having elected, and then re-elected, Cimpus Caesar + co.
Open-government advocates have hailed many of the new Obama administration's efforts to increase transparency at federal agencies. But the National Security Archive and the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington were disappointed when, just a day after the inauguration, the government moved for dismissal of long-running litigation over millions of lost Bush-era e-mails.
In a response brief filed Friday, the Archive blasted White House claims that recovery was under control as based on "untested scraps of evidence," and urged a federal court to compel archivists to request the intervention of the Attorney General under the Federal Records Act.
The watchdog groups filed suit under the FRA after learning that problems with the White House e-mail journaling system had led to the loss of some 5 million messages between 2003 and 2005. The law makes the preservation of all such official communications mandatory. In January, the government argued that suit had been rendered moot thanks to the preservation of backup tapes that will permit the eventual restoration of almost all the lost data.
Not good enough, say lawyers for the watchdog groups, because the restoration process is still ungoing, and the risk of the loss of records remains. The law, their brief argues, is clear about the required remedy: the White House and National Archives must call on the Attorney General to step in to ensure compliance with the statute. Moreover, they claim that the evidence provided to establish that the danger of deletion has passed is inadequate—and that the attempt to establish mootness at this late date amounts to little more than a bit of legal slight of hand, because it asks the court to preemptively resolve the very question that would be at issue in any decision on the merits of the case.
In a statement commenting on the case, Anne Weismann, the lead attorney for CREW, declared herself "disappointed the new administration seems no more eager than the last to recover the missing emails and implement a system that adequately preserves records belonging to the American people."
So they filed a motion to get the suit dismissed, despite the fact that the only thing the suit is asking them to do is get the justice dept involved in order to speed up the process. The archive claims they have all the emails on backup tapes, but it's been nearly a year since they found the tapes and they still haven't recovered the emails and the National Security Archive is wondering why they're dragging their feet.
