22 Million Missing Bush White House Emails Found

ctmurray writes "Computer technicians have found 22 million missing White House e-mails from the administration of President George W. Bush, and the Obama administration is searching for dozens more days' worth of potentially lost e-mail from the Bush years, according to two groups that had filed a lawsuit — which has now been dropped — over the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic record-keeping system. Earlier we discussed the Obama White House's opposition to the lawsuit that led to this discovery." The related links reflect our discussions about the missing emails over two years.

Comments

Love the spin

[sphealey]

I love the spin that is being put on this: "found", "technical problems", etc. - esp in the Washington Post. These e-mails just happened to have technical problems and get "lost" when 10 of the senior members of the Bush/Cheney Administration where under investigation concerning a conspiracy to violate foreign intelligence secrecy laws. Just happened to get "lost", yessirree.

sPh

Re:Love the spin

[Wyatt Earp]

If it really was a coverup, then they would have been deleted completely.

If I can reformat a drive to DoD 5225-22 M and find someone to destructively dispose of a disk, you don't think the USAF folks in charge of White House communications can if they were ordered too? Same goes for civilians working at the White House. If the Bush administration really wanted emails to "get lost", they would have.

Re:Love the spin

[CannonballHead]

No, because the Bush/Cheney administration are incredibly talented at pulling one of the biggest conspiracies in the history of the US while being inept, ignorant, uneducated, stupid, and a horrible public speaker. In other words, one of the smartest stupid educated ignorant uneducated charismatic foot-in-mouther guys in the world was just POTUS and deceived the entire world while completely ruining - in secret, mind you - the US economy.

And for the next X years, anything that goes wrong with foreign diplomacy, military conflicts, or the US economy is Bush's fault that Obama (or whoever else) is "cleaning up" with "tried and proven methods" of some sort (that apparently we have known about since the 30s but I guess nobody wants to try them; that or they've been tried and failed but we don't want to admit it).

-1 Flamebait, but oh well.

-1 Fire Insurance Line Was Included ;)

Re:Love the spin

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, it's logically consistent that emails should only become lost when someone has the need to look for them.

Re:Love the spin

[Chyeld]

As any mob boss will tell you, just because you tell the 'lackeys' to 'disappear' the evidence, doesn't mean they actually will. It just means it'll go away for a while.

Especially if they have a good idea that you are on the way out and a new boss is on the way in.

Re:Love the spin

[Chris Burke]

If it really was a coverup, then they would have been deleted completely.

Not necessarily, because if evidence of that deletion was found, then that in itself would have led to prosecutions. Violating the archiving laws is a serious crime, and letting the special prosecutor get them with an Al Capone gambit would have been foolish. No, much better that the data be "lost", as in present but unavailable for current use. After all, the e-mails would only have to stay missing until the investigation was concluded. Then the emails show up again, and voila -- as far as the official record goes, the Bush administration violated neither intelligence nor data archival laws.

Of course there's a simpler explanation. As TFA states: "Records released as a result of the lawsuits reveal that the Bush White House was aware during the president's first term in office that the e-mail system had serious archiving problems". So odds are that it was simply that their archival system sucked and it really did lose the emails accidentally. Sure one could argue that having a system that accidentally loses emails is convenient if you want to "accidentally" lose some emails without it being obvious, but again according to TFA they did try to get Microsoft's help to fix it before the issue even became public. And evidently failed.

Which is somewhat related to the topic my sibling post pointed out, the always droll "How can Bush be both an evil genius and a complete moron at the same time?" Well the obvious answer is that most people are some combination of smart and stupid at the same time. The Bush Admin being a perfect example. They were collectively extremely smart at getting the nation to think a war of choice was a necessity, yet they were terrible at prosecuting said war. They were great at political manipulations and neutering opponents, yet terrible at leveraging that advantage to achieve results. They were geniuses at filling positions with cronies and yes-men, but morons at hiring people who were actually competent -- including the IT department, apparently.

Anyway, getting back to the topic of these emails and how hiding them for only a short time is sufficient, the National Security Archive who the former White House spokesmen slams as "liberal" and "distorting the facts" demonstrates this clearly. They might be liberal, though they uncover dirt on liberal Presidents like Kennedy, and regardless I don't see how their liberal bias can modify the contents of documents received via FOIA. If you didn't know whether to believe that the U.S. government, and specifically Oliver North, were aware the Contras were smuggling drugs into the U.S. and approved of this, well, here's the U.S. government telling you in black and white. But it doesn't matter anymore, at least as far as North et. al. are concerned, now does it?

Re:Love the spin

[Anonymous Coward]

So inept that, despite having this on this:
http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/pdb080601.pdf
on his desk in August of 2001, he still remained in that classroom for ten minutes until after the *second* tower was hit.

But when he stood on that preventable rubble and the bodies it held to deliver his speech, tears were shed and all was forgiven. And when he and Cheney falsely implied that Iraq had something to do with it, they were given the benefit of a doubt (not by the international intelligence community, or by their advisers, but by the American public).

So yeah, it's we who are inept. CannonballHead was right about everything except Bush (and his administration, but it's mostly Bush who gets this rap) being "ignorant, uneducated, stupid." It wasn't a weird coincidence that he went around saying "evil doers" despite having a stable of professional speechwriters, or that he and his press secretaries never apologized for anything in a time of war. They had good PR men and they understood the emotional needs of a frightened country. That never really struck me as dumb. It didn't strike me as ethical either, but that goes without saying.

Re:Love the spin

[Anonymous Coward]

These emails, were actually "found" while Bush was still in office:
"Former Bush White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said the 22 million e-mails already had been recovered while Bush was still in office and that misleading statements about the former administration's work demonstrate "a continued anti-Bush agenda, nearly a year after a new president was sworn in."

http://www.military.com/news/article/22m-missing-bush-wh-emails-found.html

I wonder when Slashdot will start to cover the ENTIRE story.

Re:Love the spin

[ClosedSource]

It may just be that the "lackeys" knew that it was wrong to destroy the emails and so they got rid of them only to the extent that an average executive (or below average president) would understand.

Re:Love the spin

[ArcherB]

No, because the Bush/Cheney administration are incredibly talented at pulling one of the biggest conspiracies in the history of the US while being inept, ignorant, uneducated, stupid, and a horrible public speaker. In other words, one of the smartest stupid educated ignorant uneducated charismatic foot-in-mouther guys in the world was just POTUS and deceived the entire world while completely ruining - in secret, mind you - the US economy.

Uh, yeah. Bush and Cheney were secretly planning to ruin the economy because.... well just because they are evil.

As for who ruined the economy, and whose holding it down, if you will take the time to read the Constitution, you will learn that it is not the executive branch at all that controls the economy, but the legislative branch. So blaming Bush/Cheney or Obama/Biden really just shows ignorance. Congress controls the purse strings. I don't know if you old enough to remember, but just a few years ago, the economy was going gang-busters. When Bush took over, there was a slight recession, 9-11 made it worse, then one hell of a boom. The economy was going so well that the US government took in record tax receipts even *after* Bush's"tax cuts to the rich" (I got a tax cut. I had no idea that 50k/yr made you rich!) Then the economy tanked. What changed? Here's another hint, it rhymes with congress. The same party that took over congress then is still in control, and what do you know... the economy is still in the tank.

So, please, don't blame Bush or even Obama. It's not their fault. They just sign bills, boss the military around, and appoint judges (that still need Senate approval).

Re:Love the spin

[Chris Burke]

So, you created a nice straw man hypothetical.

Indeed I did posit a hypothetical*, but like I said I think there's a simpler explanation in an unintentionally shitty archiving system.

The issue of the GPP is that the emails were not deleted, therefore there was no cover up. You are right, _had they deleted emails_ that would have suggested a possible cover up. But, they _had not deleted_ emails. Therefore, your point is moot.

Except my actual point is that implication isn't true -- not deleting emails does not mean there was no coverup. They could have also "lost" them, and this would actually be the smart thing to do since evidence of deletion would be evidence of a cover up. That's what I meant by "Al Capone" gambit: when you can't get them for the crime, get them for the cover-up. So, if you're the conspirator, don't let them get you for the cover up by not actually deleting the emails. By the time they're found, released, and read the emails to find anything relevant, the prosecutor and you are both long gone. NSArchive is full of examples of things past their political statute of limitations, released years later.

That their archive system seems to have legitimately sucked makes that sure seem a lot less likely, though. Al Capone had a hard time arguing he didn't have good accountants. If this was actually a conspiracy, then well played, Bush Administration.

But really in however many years before NSArchive has put up their Bush Jr. documentation, I doubt any of this will be the among the most interesting reading.

* But not a straw man, because at no point did I represent this hypothetical as being someone else's argument. :P

Re:Love the spin

[erroneus]

We don't expect super0human qualities. We expect them to do their jobs without being corrupted or serving their own interests or those of their associates. We expect them to represent our interests as they promised to do in their campaigns. We expect them to uphold the constitution as they swore in their oath of office.

Re:Love the spin

[Kligat]

"'Bush's tax cuts to the rich' (I got a tax cut. I had no idea that 50k/yr made you rich!)"

I think you're being disingenuous. The point being made is that although the Bush tax cuts affected every bracket, the brackets they favored most were the highest ones.

"Then the economy tanked. What changed? Here's another hint, it rhymes with congress."

I'm sorry, but if you think that the Democrats in Congress did anything to affect the economy this badly in the space of only one year in office, I don't think you paid the slightest bit of attention to the legislation passed in 2007. You could cite legislation they passed in 2008 for making it WORSE, or reform they blocked while in the minority before 2007, but there's nothing to even correlate with the downfall of the economy for that year except for raising the minimum wage.

Secondly, in the year 2001, Republicans had a majority until June 6 when Jim Jeffords switched in June, and a 10 to 12 member majority in the House of Representatives. Using your own logic, then, the same party as the President must have been responsible.

In truth, what you describe is the official description of the president's role, but if you took a political science class, you would know the president has considerable influence over Congress. The President has used Rahm Emanuel and Joe Biden effectively to mediate disputes between members of Congress and make sure that the interests of members in favor of a bill are aligned, such that less disputes arise between one faction fighting for something in a bill another faction wants out.

Re:Love the spin

[LingNoi]

Would ten whole minutes made a difference? What did you expect him to do in that time? Use his superpowers to fly up to the second plane and fight the terrorists?

Re:Love the spin

[Xyrus]

Actually, the problems today began back in the 80's when the first wave of banking deregulation happened under Reagan. That eventually lead to the S&L scandal. However, that didn't keep deregulation from happening. The late 90's was the next big flub. After World War Web happened, interest rates were dropped through the floor. The deregulation removed leverage limits and all those other pesky regulations that prevented banks from acting like drunken sailors. Then the whole thing fell apart when everyone realized they were holding steaming piles instead of pipe dreams.

There is no one party to fault here. This was helped along by both sides of the aisle, at the insistence of big banking. Enough green and you can make anything happen in congress. It also helps if your elected congress creature can't tell the the difference between a CD and a CDS.

In any event, the greed fueled money orgy was pushed for by the banks and granted by congress with BOTH parties. The measures were signed by presidents of BOTH parties.

WE, the people, were screwed by just about everyone. At least they bought us a drink ("stimulus" checks).

~X~

Re:Love the spin

[bennomatic]

Bush and Cheney were secretly planning to ruin the economy

No, they didn't want to ruin the economy; they just wanted to concentrate greater wealth into the hands of fewer people. They don't see that as the ruination of the economy, since those with wealth continue to live in comfort as long as things don't get quite bad enough for a revolution.

Bush's"tax cuts to the rich" (I got a tax cut. I had no idea that 50k/yr made you rich!)

Depends on where you are and who you're comparing yourself to. But in most places outside the SF Bay Area and NYC, 50k/yr makes you pretty comfortably middle class unless you've got a mess of kids and you've bought more house than you can afford.

But the 3% or so that you saved translates to no more than $1500/year of tax reduction for you. It's something, but not a lot. Now, give that same 3% tax break to someone who's pulling down 100 million dollars per year, and suddenly you've left up to $3M in the pockets of one household. And that's not even considering all the other tax breaks that wealthier people have access to.

And the thing to think about here is the tipping point, the point where, for most Americans, an extra $100 a month is the difference between falling behind and getting ahead. Or the difference between saving for your kid's education or hoping for a scholarship. Or buying those new brake pads or waiting a month or two. $1500 a year in savings for a middle class person might make a more substantive difference in their daily lives than the $3M would for the person brining in $100M per year. Except for the principle of the matter, the richer person wouldn't even notice it.

And that's the core of why people complain about Reagan and Bush's "tax cuts for the wealthy". It's not that they didn't benefit a substantial number of average people in some way--they did. But they provided a windfall for the sector of society that simply did not need it, and with all the lost tax revenue, services for those who are the most in need of them have been repeatedly cut. Public schools, mental health institutions, scientific research, even our national parks have had to scale back services, privatize and focus on profits instead of their core goals, to what has been--I feel--the detriment of society.

I don't think that everything is the fault of any individual executive, but the POTUS does indeed set the agenda; tax cuts were one of Bush's mantra through the whole of his eight years. Combine that with a completely unbalanced budget, two major wars and the continuation of 30 years of removing checks on the banking industry, and the current economic situation was completely predictable.

I think the process of concentration of wealth within a society is not a bad thing overall, but when it gets to a certain point, it becomes difficult for that society to continue to grow and prosper, as there are so many people struggling to get by, surviving at the effective whims of the wealthiest classes. I say treat it like a game: Look! These people won. Now start over and redistribute everything and you get to play again. Think about it. How much fun would a game of Monopoly be if the winner from the last round got to start the next game with all of his or her holdings?

I don't believe in revolutions; they're too bloody. But bloodless redistribution of wealth is possible. It can be done through taxes, or the wealthy can just man up an let go of 90% of their holdings. Rich people don't need money; they'll get rich again. Look at Don Trump: it wasn't that long ago that he was over $100M under water, but that didn't stop him.

Re:Love the spin

[hairyfeet]

Yeah, I'm afraid that any doubt about what kind of president he was kinda left the building when he called the constitution a just a Goddamned piece of paper, at least it did for me,YMMV.

Re:Love the spin

[Anonymous Coward]

Some? America hasn't left South Korea yet. When did America enter Korea? 1950? America is still dealing with that, 60 years later.

Still, G.W.B. failed in terms of history. That much is easy to see. Diverting resources from Afghanistan for his personal war was pointless, especially since it allowed the Taliban to regroup (and take over parts of an allied land!). Saddam was an enormous asshole, mind you. And he should have been removed from power in 1992. Instead, we told Iraqis to fight Saddam, promise support, do nothing, let them get slaughtered for a decade while Saddam destroyed his opposition, and wonder why we're having trouble forming a stable government now. (Hint: the opposition party is dead)

It's still better politically than Vietnam was. At least we aren't trying to suppress a long standing popular revolutionary movement. (Indeed, Ho Chi Minh wrote several letters to the American presidents, hoping for our support in their revolution against France's imperialist power)

Let's not get into the ridiculous entitlements and tax cuts GWB gave the babyboomers. Promises for nearly 60 trillion dollars over the next 40 years are law, right now. America is on its way to bankruptcy, unless big (unpopular) changes are made.

Re:Love the spin

[jimbolauski]

So the Bush administration was the one who forced banks to give out loans to people who couldn't pay them back, or was it the Bush administration who's boyfriend was the head of fannie may and the administration blindly defended them stopping a probe many years before the housing crash. Was it the Bush administration that feveroushly fought to stop drilling for oil in the US which would lead to more money staying in the country. I'm not saying that Bush did not make mistakes but to say he was directly responsible is ignorant, there is more then enough blame to go around.

Wait

[BitHive]

Are we to understand that it was the people in Bush's white house that failed, and not "the gubbermint"? Nonsense and tosh! If people are the root cause of government's failures then the party of "government sucks" has some mirror-gazing to do.

Re:Wait

[wizardforce]

Oh I wouldn't be so quick to defend the democrats either. Most of congress was right there with Bush on a number of controversial issues up to and including when the democrats had control. Both parties are guilty as frak and you'd have to be extraordinarily naive to believe that that kind of corruption and failure will be limited to Bush and friends.

Re:Wait

[wchin]

Cut the size of government and its power and you cut the opportunity for mischief and mayhem.

If only it were that simple. If the functions that a particular government organization is performing are cut and then are merely transferred to private enterprise, then the opportunity for mischief and mayhem remain, at best, the same. In addition, private enterprise is by many metrics less transparent, less accountable, and more profit driven than government. If that function was for the public good, then going private enterprise means less accountability and more mischief and mayhem... but at least with less transparency, you and I might know less about it.

I am not advocating bigger government or smaller government. In the end, there are no easy solutions which makes public policy and the business of government very boring and unsuited to 30 second soundbites. Our system is still very flawed and the way our politicians play the game these days just makes it worse. But of course, it is the people that lets this happen and the people in the end have to decide as collective to fix it.

Re:TWO DAY OLD NEWS

[wizardforce]

Slashdot has never really been the place to come for the latest news. It is however, the best place to discuss news.

20 million? Hard to believe!

[bogaboga]

It's hard to believe that the former Bush Administration edited 22 million emails.

That would mean at least 7,500 emails per day including weekends and holidays; and at least 5 emails per minute.

Now, just tell me who in Bush's administration was spewing such an amount of email.

Re:20 million? Hard to believe!

[jbengt]

If I had mod points, I'd mod you up.
I remember reading something about a Bush official talking about how terrible and obsolete the old Lotus system was and how they had modernized the system by going Outlook and Exchange. (ouch)
On the other hand, it's not hard to imagine that these particular "mislabeled" emails were lost for other reasons, inadvertant or otherwise.

Re:20 million? Hard to believe!

[Anonymous Coward]

+1

I've got to agree. Exchange is definitely not built for organizations and institutions that need archiving and compliance components.

But of course the White House doesn't need any of those things.

Re:It's not all of them

[amRadioHed]

Any really damning stuff would not be in emails to begin with. Cheney learned a lot during his time in the Nixon White House.

An all-time lawsuit low...

[geekmux]

"...two groups that had filed a lawsuit — which has now been dropped — over the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic record-keeping system.

what exactly is the fucking point over a lawsuit to prove that one of the most secretive components of our Government actually saved data that is very well likely to be CLASSIFIED to begin with? Did these groups or the lawyers actually think they were going to be allowed to see the "hard evidence" of this? Give me a fucking break.

Regardless of how you may feel about Bush and the job that Administration did, this is an utterly pointless lawsuit that reeks of bashing one(of many) "rough" Administrations. Not to mention the fact that the current Administration sure as hell was opposed to this kind of lawsuit setting ANY sort of precedent, which obviously goes to show you that no matter who is in charge or their political affiliation, NOBODY wants this information out on ANY Administration.

Re:An all-time lawsuit low...

[PhxBlue]

what exactly is the fucking point over a lawsuit to prove that one of the most secretive components of our Government actually saved data that is very well likely to be CLASSIFIED to begin with? Did these groups or the lawyers actually think they were going to be allowed to see the "hard evidence" of this? Give me a fucking break.

Your post, sir/ma'am, is full of fail.

If we were talking about e-mails on a classified network, then the data would be gone. The process for cleaning a hard drive of classified information is to randomly overwrite the HDD with random bits no fewer than five times ... and then degauss the son of a bitch.

Now, if we were talking about classified information on an unclassified system, that's practically a cyber-oil spill, and I imagine the press would have been all over it.

So, no. We're talking about information that's maybe For Official Use Only or Law Enforcement Sensitive. And the more of it the American public gets to see, the better.

The only person here who's not an asstard

[Anonymous Coward]

The only person on this website who's not an asstard just responded with the only post that isn't fucking uninformed, stupid and wrong. Thank you.

Re:TWO DAY OLD NEWS

[wizardforce]

If Slashdot's primary function was to simply present a news story without regard to comments, there'd be little need for a moderation system or comments for that matter. The only reason Slashdot got as far as it did was the moderation system that allows fruitful discussion of articles. Without it, Slashdot would be long dead.

Re:Never really missing...

[gmhowell]

Conspiracy theorists are NEVER disappointed. If they find the evidence, that is proof of the conspiracy. If they find NO evidence, that is proof that the conspiracy runs even deeper than suspected.

Re:I knew this was coming

[feepness]

They can pull the wool over non technical peoples eyes, but I have no doubt they purposely FUBAR'ed this, there was no reason not to go with an industry standard solution from the get go unless they were up to no good.

You ever worked with a government contractor, or even a huge corporation?

I'm sure the OTS solution was unacceptable because it wasn't using legacy 3.5" single sided floppies formatted for 937.73K each running on a CP/M terminal accessible by thirteen different departments in nine different ways each by thirty-five untrained secretaries with a five second response time that of course would never be used by any of them. And also the servers had to be the proper shade of green.

The government has zero incentive for either doing things right or cheap. Why would you pay for something cheap off the shelf when you could spend a couple hundred million for a few years and fail with no consequences?

Re:Standard IT issues

[zeroduck]

If this wasn't purely about politics, where were their fucking lawsuits when the Clinton-Gore administration lost emails?

At least according to their Wikipedia page, they were founded in 2003.

I certainly hope they don't just fold because another party is in charge now. It seems like they've done good work so far, hopefully they'll watch the Obama administration as they did the Bush administration.

22 Million

[got2liv4him]

viagra ads.... don't we have something else to worry about...

Don't forget the use of private email

[GodfatherofSoul]

We also know that the Bush administration purposefully pushed conversations out to private email accounts to hide what they were up to. We have email messages where correspondents say to take conversations off the record.

Gonna be a blame bonanza

[Shivetya]

I cannot wait for the leaks, figure we can have yet another year of "see, it was Bush's fault and here is the email to prove it, not that we leaked it"

Considering that every administration has problem with records perhaps it needs to be outsourced.