Saturday, May 10, 2008

TPR: Lost E-Mails Obscure 'Plame-gate.'



Jason Leopold's new website, The Public Record, is now up and running. The link to Jason's website is on the left hand side. Check it out!


Lost E-Mails Obscure 'Plame-gate'

By Jason Leopold

The Public Record

May 10, 2008


Earlier this week, the White House disclosed that it could not recover lost e-mails from emergency backup tapes for the period covering the invasion of Iraq and the U.S. failure to find Iraq’s alleged WMD.

This new gap – from March 1, 2003, to May 23, 2003 – also may have wiped out evidence of how George W. Bush and his top aides reacted to the emerging criticism from former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson that the White House had sold the war using false claims about Iraq seeking uranium from Niger in Africa, an investigation by The Public Record http://www.pubrecord.org/ has found.

“It seems clear now that the e-mail backups are spotty and that there is no guarantee that there are backup tapes for all of [Executive Office of the President] during the period of concern, March 2003-October 2005,” said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel of George Washington University’s National Security Archive, one of two organizations suing the White House in hopes of forcing the administration to preserve its e-mails.

“There are no tapes from earlier than May 23, 2003,” Fuchs added, referring to an apparent violation of the Presidential Records Act. “So, anything deleted from the EOP network prior to May 23, 2003 (particularly between March 2003 and May 23, 2003) is missing from the backup tapes.”

More on the story.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Doesn't IT "professional" Theresa Payton have a history of helping emails disappear in other sticky situations?