House Select Committee on Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy said Tuesday it may still be “technically possible” to retrieve thousands of emails to and from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the private server her lawyer said was “wiped clean.”
Clinton used a private email account and server located in her New York residence to conduct official government business throughout her tenure as the nation’s chief diplomat. David Kendall, her lawyer, told Gowdy Friday that the emails are no longer accessible by the server’s cleaning.
Multiple federal laws and regulations require all federal employees to provide copies of all their emails and text messages concerning official business that are sent on private email accounts to be copied to their employing agency for preservation.
Clinton is only the most recent of a number of public figures to become embroiled in scandals in which their emails were declared lost as congressional investigators closed in on them. Sometimes those “lost” emails have been recovered.
The IRS ‘computer crash’
Emails to and from Lois Lerner, the former head of the IRS’s tax exempt office, were said to be lost in a mysterious computer crash at the federal tax agency in 2014 when the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee demanded to see them.
The Oversight Committee was more than a year into its investigation of illegal targeting and harassment of conservative and Tea Party nonprofit applicants during the 2010 and 2012 campaigns.
Months after the IRS head claimed Lerner’s emails were permanently deleted due to the hardware malfunction, the Treasury Department’s inspector general pulled tens of thousands of messages off the same hardware. Those emails are now being prepared for release to Congress.
5,000 phantom texts at EPA
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy has repeatedly clashed with both Congress and her agency’s inspector general over a probe of alleged employee misconduct and obstruction of an internal investigation.
Members of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology have expressed concerns after they subpoenaed 5,000 text messages that McCarthy had apparently deleted from her phone.
“The EPA would have us believe that despite the fact that thousands of text messages are being received, none of them are important enough to be saved as federal record,” said Rep. Jim Bridenstine, R-Okla., of the deleted texts. “How can we know that the agency isn’t getting rid of records it is required to preserve?”
Lawmakers are presently seeking records of the 5,000 deleted messages through a subpoena.
White House to HHS: ‘Please delete this message’
Marilyn Tavenner, then head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, was the subject of scrutiny in August 2014 after she deleted a series of emails between herself and the Obama White House in which officials discussed the disastrous roll-out of the Healthcare.gov web site.
“Time and again, the self-proclaimed ‘most transparent administration’ has been anything but. And now we know that when Healthcare.gov was crashing, those in charge were hitting the delete button behind the scenes. What was the Obama administration trying to hide?” said Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., of the deleted messages.
Tavenner’s attempts to scrub emails came as congressional investigators probed the process that led to the botched Obamacare website launch.
Missing month of messages at DOJ
Large caches of emails to and from John Yoo, a top official in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, were found to have been deleted when investigators went looking for the records of the federal attorneys who had crafted the legal justification for the Bush administration’s controversial interrogation techniques.
Investigators also discovered a month’s worth of email records to and from Patrick Philbin, another top Justice Department lawyer, had been deleted from his server. The month in question was a critical time in the agency’s development of the so-called “torture memos,” according to The New York Times.
Batches of emails from both Philbin and Yoo were later recovered and produced in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
EPA rewired the hard drives
Years before the issue of deleting government emails became a prominent concern, the EPA was under fire for violating a court’s orders that it save all emails as a FOIA lawsuit over the records was decided.
When the Landmark Legal Foundation sued to compel the agency to respond to its request for documentation of environmental records for which notice had not yet been given in 2003, EPA officials wiped their servers of emails and flouted the injunction on tampering with such records.
“Despite the court’s order, the hard drives of several EPA officials were reformatted, email backup tapes were erased and reused, and individuals deleted emails received after that date,” court documents show.
The legal foundation was seeking evidence that the EPA was intentionally delaying the public announcement of environmental regulations that would be politically controversial.
Nine years later, the foundation filed another lawsuit over a second FOIA request for information that could have shown whether former EPA chief Lisa Jackson stalled the release of contentious environmental regulations until after the 2012 elections.
The suit forced Jackson and other officials to admit that they had used personal email accounts and phones to avoid their requirements to preserve records, according to media reports.
