Froomkin: Focus on Law-Breaking, Not Lost Emails

Contempt for the Law
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, January 17, 2008; 1:16 PM


There is much cause for outrage over the White House's brazen disregard for federal public records law, which may well have resulted in the destruction of millions of official e-mails. But today's focus on the recycling of backup tapes may actually be a bit of a red herring.

The law is clear that e-mails sent and received by anyone in the White House -- just like all official White House documents -- should be instantaneously and automatically archived.

So someone in the White House should have been making sure the law was being followed, and that all e-mails were indeed being properly stored for posterity.

That same someone also should have been making sure White House staffers weren't circumventing archive requirements by using outside e-mail addresses. But the White House legal counsel's office remained silent as top aides, including Karl Rove, fired off possibly hundreds of thousands of official-business e-mails from Republican National Committee accounts, where most data is routinely deleted after 30 days.

The matter in the news today relates not to those e-mails, but to as many as several million others -- these actually on the eop.gov accounts -- that seem to have vanished.

The best information we have about those e-mails comes from an Aug. 30, 2007 letter from House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman to White House Counsel Fred Fielding, outlining what congressional investigators had discovered so far.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2008/01/17/BL2008011701213.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

NAME ANY REPUBLICAN ADMIN THAT WAS CLEAN.