White House Email Follies

Presto Vivace forwards a link detailing a recent House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing on the White House missing emails mess. David Gewirtz's report, carried in OutlookPower and DominoPower (in 6 parts, keep clicking), makes for scary reading. "If, in fact, the bulk of the White House email records are now stored in bundles of rotting PST files, all at or above their maximum safe load-level, that ain't good in a very big way... I object to using the inaccurate and inflated claim of excessive cost as a reason to avoid compliance with the Presidential Records Act."

Comments

Who cares?

[MillionthMonkey]

All their interesting stuff went through private mail servers at the RNC to evade responsibility for document retention under the Presidential Records Act. The RNC systematically destroys its emails and Bush has even invoked executive privilege in ordering the RNC to defy Congressional subpoenas to produce them.

Re:Who cares?

[MillionthMonkey]

There's also the Hatch Act, which (among other things) prevents government computers from being used for political activities. Emails regarding political activities went through the RNC servers (or, in the case of the Clinton Administration, the DNC servers); emails regarding activities as President, i.e. the Presidential Records, are supposed to go through the White House email system, where they are backed up and archived. So, you cannot infer an intent to violate the Presidential Records Act merely from the fact that outside services were used.

There, I helped you out with a few BOLD tags. Your mistake is assuming that an email either falls under the scope of partisian political activity or represents communication at official levels regarding government business. They sent emails that were both.

When you're having an email conversation (for example) about which U.S. Attorneys should be fired by the president for prosecuting Republican offenses or for not going after Democrats in election years, and what the cover stories for the firings should be, you're mixing political partisan activity and official government business. Since these emails were illegal for government officials to be sending, they obviously didn't use the White House email infrastructure to send them. Even these guys weren't that stupid. They were dumb enough, though, to indicate in WH emails when they were going to continue certain conversations, regarding planned activities to be carried out in an official capacity, in nongovernmental channels (RNC, gwb43.com, Yahoo Mail) to avoid them from ever becoming public.

But the purpose of the Hatch Act (passed in 1939) isn't just to protect Outlook servers from private or partisan use- it forbids the use of any federal agencies or resources to assist in partisan activities. That would include both WH email servers and the U.S. Department of Justice.

Re:What?

[vertinox]

What exactly is the safe load level for a PST file?

About 1.9 GB on an older PST file and anymore will crap out.

Outlook 2003 and greater will allow 20gb files, but they become horrendously slow after 5 to 10 gb.

And yes.. People will store gigabytes of email on an exchange server... Usually when they are emailing large videos, photoshop files, or do Desktop publishing work. Though I wonder what the Whitehouse doing to take up that much space.

Certainaly it wasn't powerpoints on intelligence reports.