A few weeks back, I wrote a longer article on why presidents don’t use email. A not entirely unrelated issue is email retention under the Presidential Records Act, which requires all email to be archived and eventually disclosed years after the president has left office. Democratic congressmen are crying foul that certain messages were lost, and a lawsuit was filed to uncover the details about how this happened.
The White House does not have to make public internal documents examining the potential disappearance of e-mails sent during some of the Bush administration’s biggest controversies, a U.S. district judge ruled yesterday. In a 39-page opinion, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said that the White House’s Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), even though its top officials had complied with the public records law for more than two decades. The Office of Administration, which performs a variety of services for the Executive Office of the President, announced it would no longer comply with the FOIA last August, three months after an independent watchdog group filed a lawsuit seeking to discover what happened to the e-mails, which may have vanished from White House computer archives. The White House has been criticized by congressional Democrats, historians and watchdog groups over alleged sloppy retention of e-mails between 2001 and 2005, a period that included the Iraq war.
For historians, this certainly could impair their ability to recreate the internal workings of the staff. I’m nevertheless confident a more formidable obstacle will be sorting through the gazillions of messages to find the information that is truly of value. And to those who suspect foul play, bear in mind the Clinton White House had a similar problem. A year’s messages disappeared including many related to a criminal investigation.
