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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.
"The liberal groups CREW and National Security Archive litigate for sport, distort the facts and have consistently tried to create a spooky conspiracy out of standard IT issues" - Former Bush White House spokesman Scott Stanzel
Yeah, those stupid liberal groups are just out to hodgepodge the truth again. All we did was violate 2 federal laws by not keeping records of our communications, and had insanely incompetent I.T. staff at this, the richest and most powerful country in the world. What a bunch of baloney. Just an honest mistake. Tens of millions of e-mails, big whoop. Wanna fight about it?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
> 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.
Bush may or may not have been inept; on that we will actually will have to wait for the verdict of history. Cheney was however one of the most stunningly successful senior executives in US history, getting more of his agenda accomplished than any other President except FDR and possibly more than him as well (so much is still classified so we don't and may never know). To call Cheney "stupid" or "inept" is, well, foolish.
And if it is impossible for a large group to keep a secret in Washington DC, answer me this: besides Libby, Addington, and Yoo, who were the other 37 members of Cheney's staff from 2001-2009? Oh wait, their names, salaries, titles, and duties were kept secret for 8 years, Cheney used his self-granted power to classify the information secret, and it never leaked. Nor did the members or agenda of Cheney's 2001 oil conference ever leak. Again, after the events of 2002-2006 to say it is not possible to manage a secret concerted effort in DC is foolish.
sPh
Bush may or may not have been inept; on that we will actually will have to wait for the verdict of history.
Then you aren't the type of person/attitude I was sarcastically aiming at :)
To call Cheney "stupid" or "inept" is, well, foolish.
I agree.
And if it is impossible for a large group to keep a secret in Washington DC, answer me this:
It's certainly not impossible; and while investigating is fine and I don't have a problem with that, many seem to run rampant with conspiracy theories based on nothing more than the fact that they don't know (even though with some of them, we probably do know, but it doesn't suit their particular political bent - whether R. or D.).
I was primarily venting because I get tired of - and not you, apparently - various people attacking Bush (or Obama, for that matter) as being both exceedingly cunning/educated/knowledgeable-about-everything-going-on and stupid/ignorant/high-school-dropout. Slightly exaggerated, depending on who you talk to. "My" side - since conservatives tend to be Republicans - do it with Obama, too. Obama is well on his way, apparently, to turn the US into a Muslim country, to completely ruin the country economically and to ruin health care, all the while being ignorant, inept, and completely inexperienced.
I actually disagree very strongly with Obama on many issues... unfortunately, when many people disagree, they get angry; and when angry, they apparently don't think rationally and start accusing of even contradictory things....
That happens when you change from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange.
It is amazing that this many were recoverable at all.
Perhaps someone in IT considered the possibility that the
migration to Exchange would fail, and kept feeding all of the
e-mails to another set of servers for, you know, safekeeping.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Don't forget CC emails probably count as multiples. So say one person sends an email and CCs 9 others, that 10 emails in total. Then you possibly need to include the Sent folder, so add another email on top of that. Making 11 emails in total for just one sent email in this situation.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
12345
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Brilliant analysis. I would also add that you have to factor in Karl Rove retaining his e-mail account and Blackberry on the Republican National Committee server, which was not covered by the Presidential Records Act, for use in his role managing the Republican Party, and then conveniently "forgetting" to switch back to his White House userid when he handled e-mail related to official government business in his government-salaried job. Potentially including the routing of classified information through the non-secure RNC system.
sPh
I knew this was coming when I first heard about the White House scrapping their previous GroupWise based email archiving system, as they were switching to Exchange, and deciding to roll their own archiving system.
Thanks to Sarbanes-Oxley, email archiving is big business now and you can buy enterprise ready solution from the likes of EMC.
Instead they decided to have a private contractor roll a custom system, spent a couple hundred million and 2 years, and then scrapped it for not working right (scrapped by the White House CIO).
In the end they implemented an EMC solution, right before Bush left office.
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.
Supporting facts: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20080417/chron.htm
Re-reading, though, I still think there's a problem; if Cheney was so good at keeping these things a secret, you'd think his secret-keeping IT staff would have deleted the e-mails from backups, too, as WyattEarp said.
Even I would have done that if I were trying to cover up something that badly.
Something, at least, seems fishy there.
I'll contribute to the conspiracy theories!
Perhaps 18 months was how long they needed to sort through 22 million emails and remove any traces of illegal activity. Now that the emails have been sanitized, they have been miraculously "found".
Or, perhaps the provided reason for discovery points to why these email were not deleted... they were mislabeled as backups for a different system and thus never destroyed by the Cheney-ites. We may be days away from announcements of indictments against the Bush Administration!
Or, maybe the IT Staff were just incompetent and these emails will ultimately be meaningless.
This is fun!
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
If you talking about the Valerie Plame thing, it turns out that there was no cover up because it wasn't the administration that leaked the name. Remember Dick Armitage?
However, I will say that the administration didn't want an investigation into that leading to something else. I remember another president was being investigated for something he was cleared of (Whitewater) and ended up getting into trouble from something completely unrelated (Lewinski).
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Remember that Patrick Fitzgerald said he could not complete his investigation because of the conspiracy to obstruct justice, and that there was "a cloud over the Office of the Vice-President"? Remember that Novak testified that Armitage leaked the information to him, but that in no way proved that Armitage was the only person who leaked information, or even that Armitage was the first to leak? Remember the notes in Libby's handwriting on the typed minutes of his meetings with Cheney?
I am so happy that I don't know the level of raw hatred and paranoia to continue to blame someone for a crime AFTER someone else has confessed (Armitage), that confession has been confirmed (by Novak) and the case has been closed.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Don't get me wrong, I actually like Obama, but isn't it somewhat... suspicious?.. that these emails where found a year after Obama's administration took office.. right around the time when his ratings are at an all time low?
I was stunned by your quotation of Bush. I had never heard anything like that before and agree that such a statement coming from a sitting President (or even a former President) would be very disturbing. I followed the link, read the article, and noticed that the author did not cite ANY sources of this comment. I noticed he also attached outrageous statements to other administration officials, also without citing any references. I searched the internet could not find any other sources for any of the author's claims, other than repetition of the same article you linked to. I must conclude that the writer of that article is not telling the truth and you have been duped. If there had been any truth to this kind of statement, other media would have latched onto this. I am not saying there aren't numerous other reasons to despise Bush, it simply appears that this one didn't actually happen.
I agree that people like that live in a troubling tautology. But there's another thing at work here, and probably the most important and successful conspiracy working today - and that is the conspiracy to discredit conspiracy theorists. The popular opinion today is that conspiracy theorists are nutters, and that's a real boon to anyone involved in a conspiracy. If they're being investigated, there's already a prejudice to dismiss the investigator as crazy. How wonderfully useful.
A conspiracy is when two or more people enter into a secret agreement to do something illegal. This happens ALL THE TIME. No doubt everybody here has been involved in at least one conspiracy. You can barely get through adolescence without it. That everyone now has a knee-jerk reaction to think of anyone talking conspiracy is crazy is a coup for corruption.