Slashdot Mirror


Obama Admin Fights Missing White House Email Lawsuit

DesScorp writes "The AP reports that the Obama administration has picked up where the Bush administration left off on the missing White House email issue by trying to have a lawsuit dismissed that would have kept investigating whether or not email was still missing. Two advocacy groups suing the Executive Office of the President expressed disappointment with the Obama administration's actions. 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."

5 of 345 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Have you ever had a job? by twotailakitsune · · Score: 0, Troll

    Obama's staff is on a budged. The more people he hires, the more he needs to ask the RIAA for money. Lucky for him, he got some RIAA people working with him.

  2. Re:Slashdot versus Reality by twotailakitsune · · Score: 0, Troll

    How about the pork for golf courses? Who needs golf courses when you have the internet?

  3. Re:It's government corruption by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 0, Troll

    You've got it backwards. The current president is always somewhat at the mercy of the existing bureaucracy. Even if he fires all the department heads and replaces them with his own handpicked staff, it's impossible to replace the entire Supreme Court (with its Bush appointees) and the secondary leaders of the military forces, State department, SEC, Justice Department, and Treasury all in one step. But those people were mostly hired by Bush or his appointees (or by Dick Cheney and his contracting acquaintances), and they were taught to cooperate with all these nasty policies. I'm not suggesting that Mr. Obama shouldn't try to do a clean sweep and open up government: I'm saying that he's going to have one hell of a time with the entrenched bureaucrats and war criminals of the old Bush administration, and they're probably fighting him as much as they can on such policies.

  4. Re:It's government corruption by rtb61 · · Score: 0, Troll

    There is a standing international law where all countries are financial liable for all the actions of their government regardless of how corrupt they are. So for example prosecute Bush Cheney and co for illegal entry to the Iraq war, win the case and immediately get sued by every US family (and allies) whose family member died in a illegal war, 4,200 odd, times by ten million dollars 42 billion dollars now to make that even more interesting add civil suits coming out of Iraq. Send Bush Cheney and Co to prison for torture and murder, something on the order of a thousand people and a ten billion goes down the drain.

    In fact pretty much where ever you look people have been hurt and killed all over the world by the corruption of the US government under the republicans both the administration and in the congress and the senate. You pretty much always end up having to pay billions of dollars in civil damages, something the US can't afford in the current economic climate. In doing so it is something that immediately brands them as unjust and as accessories to the crimes of the previous administration for failing to prosecute them.

    As it turns out the likely safest route is to go whole hog and charge specific members with treason for the overall destructiveness and corruption of that administration. That way all their criminal activities just become evidence for the greater crime rather than convictions for the lesser crimes and, you can bury some things for reasons of national security (pardon the pun). Obama and his administration are stuck in between a rock and a hard place. Prosecute and possibly cost the US billions in civil damages, don't prosecute and be immediately tarred by the previous administrations corruption and that is the only thing they will be remembered for, that and for inviting even worse administration to appear in the future, after all Bush Cheney and Co got away with what they did, how much more corrupt can future administrations be.

    --
    Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
  5. Re:Only on slashdot... by sumdumass · · Score: 0, Troll

    G.W, didn't need to rely on Nixon or Johnson. He got away with what a lot happened because of incompetence leading to technical problems. This is especially true with the missing emails. The white house supposedly archived the PST files containing the emails because the firm that convinced them switching to Exchange was going to be more productive couldn't extract the emails and sort them and they couldn't get the email archive on line. Something like three years past with nothing but nightly backups of PST files for email retention and the email retention system once working was totally indelicate for the purpose of retrieving the previous emails.

    What ended up happening is that each days PST file had to be opened and searched and often restored from backup for any information needed for each computer that might have been used with the accounts. Then some of the tapes came up missing and bla bla bla, we have what we have right now. Now this change over was actually commisioned under Clinton because the old email system was outgrown and being patched together but it was clear that it wouldn't last. If they switched to something like a Sendmail or Postfix Email server the email would have been on index-able plain text files that could easily have been rolled into a simple relational database capable of filling in the retention needs. Instead, a propriatary format was used and we have what we see today.