CREW ASKS AG MUKASEY TO APPOINT SPECIAL COUNSEL TO INVCREW ASKS AG MUKASEY TO APPOINT SPECIAL COUNSEL TO INVESTIGATE DISESTIGATE DISAPPEARANCE OF MILLIONS OF WHITE HOUSE EMAILS
http://www.citizensforethics.org/node/309324 Feb 2008 // Washington, DC - Today, in light of the emerging details of the disappearance of millions of White House emails, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sent a letter to Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey asking that he appoint a special counsel to investigate the matter. Specifically, CREW asked for an investigation into whether the White House violated federal record-keeping laws by knowingly failing to preserve and restore millions of emails and by deliberately failing to use an effective and appropriate record-keeping system for the preservation of federal and presidential electronic records. The White House is subject to two sets of federal laws governing how it must maintain and preserve its records, the Federal Records Act (FRA) and the Presidential Records Act (PRA).
On January 15th, in a court filing submitted in response to CREW v. Executive Office of the President, the White House admitted destroying back-up copies of some of its emails. Over 10 million emails are missing from between March 2003 and October 2005 and the White House stated that up until October of 2003, back-up tapes containing the only copies of some of the missing emails were recycled.
This means that there likely are no back-up copies of emails deleted during the period of March 2003 through October 2003, the time during which top White House officials leaked the covert identity of Valerie Plame Wilson and the Justice Department began a criminal investigation into the leak. The White House has offered no explanation as to why the emails were deleted, how many were actually lost and why it never acted to recover any of the missing emails, despite having been presented with a recovery plan by its own Office of Administration.
After filing this court document, the White House deputy press secretary denied that there were, in fact, any missing emails. .............