White House had daily audits of e-mails, which suggests missing e-mails were destroyed.

From the CREW:

As CREW's Anne Weismann told Bloomberg News, that certainly suggests the e-mails weren't lost in a technical glitch:

The revelation that there were daily audits suggests that e-mails were destroyed, said Anne Weismann, general counsel of the nonprofit watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sued the Bush administration in May over the missing e-mails.

"It's hard to imagine it could have been a technical problem," Weismann said in an interview. It is "incomprehensible that e-mail could go missing and it not be caught."

And according to Waxman's recent letter to Fielding, Waxman's wrote:

On May 29,2007, Keith Roberts, the Deputy General Counsel of the White House Office
of Administration, and Emmet Flood, Special Counsel to the President, briefed Committee staffon the White House e-mail system and the missing e-mails. At the briefing, Mr. Roberts informed Committee staff that the White House had discovered in 2005 that an unknown number of e-mails may not have been preserved in the White House archive, as required by the Presidential Records Act. According to Mr. Roberts, the Offrce of the Chief Information Officer then conducted a review of the e-mail system to determine the scope of the potential loss. He said that this review apparently found some days with a very small number of preserved e-mails and some days with no e-mails preserved at all. He also stated that areport summarizing these findings had been presented to the White House Counsel's office.

In addition, Mr. Roberts informed the Committee that an unidentified company working
for the Information Assurance Directorate of the Office of the Chief Information Officer was responsible for daily audits of the e-mail system and the e-mail archiving process. Mr. Roberts was not able to explain why the daily audits conducted by this contractor failed to detect the problems in the archive system when they first began.

Hmm.. Could it be Sidley Austin and Wood LLP? A blogger wrote on CREW website:

Sidley Austin is one of the largest and most prestigious law firms in the US, employing 1700 attorneys (per wikipedia) in offices on four continents. They were employed by the White House to advise on “document retention” issues and now are about to be embroiled in the issue of 5 million missing White House emails.

This is interesting on Sidley law firm website:



Rest assured all companies, institutions, government, and so have audits. White House is no different.