Does Anyone Know What Happened to Those 22 Million Emails

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Oct 31, 2016 at 4:54 PM

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Does Anyone Know What Happened to Those 22 Million Emails From the Bush White House?

Did you look in the couch?

Getty + Chip Somdevilla

By Charles P. Pierce

Oct 31, 2016

You know, I think I'll just leave this little bit from Newsweek here for a while.

Most troubling, researchers found a suspicious pattern in the White House email system blackouts, including periods when there were no emails available from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. "That the vice president's office, widely characterized as the most powerful vice president in history, should have no archived emails in its accounts for scores of days—especially days when there was discussion of whether to invade Iraq—beggared the imagination," says Thomas Blanton, director of the Washington-based National Security Archive.

The NSA (not to be confused with the National Security Agency, the federal surveillance organization) is a nonprofit devoted to obtaining and declassifying national security documents and is one of the key players in the effort to recover the supposedly lost Bush White House emails.

You recall the furious scrum among the elite political press over these revelations, right? I mean, 22 million e-mails? Lost? And from a private server, too. Jason Chaffetz must have been leaking like the Andrea Doria over this because of his principled devotion to governmental transparency. And I am the Tsar of all the Russias.

When Bill Clinton moved into the White House, his lawyers supported the elder Bush in his effort to uphold a side deal he'd cut with the National Archives and Records Administration to allow him to treat his White House emails as personal.

At the time, George Stephanopoulos—then the White House communications director—defended the resistance, saying his boss, like Bush, didn't want subsequent, and potentially unfriendly, administrations rooting around in old emails.

The Clinton White House eventually settled the suit, and White House aide John Podesta—now Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman—even invited members of the National Security Archive into the White House to demonstrate how the new system worked. If anyone tried to delete an email, a message would pop up on screen indicating that to do so would be in violation of the PRA

Along with influence peddling and humidity in August, ass-covering is one of the most permanent features of our permanent governing class, and it is a bipartisan enterprise involving all our elite political institutions, in and out of government.

The Senate Judiciary Committee was operating on a different track but having no more luck. In a bipartisan vote in 2008, the committee found White House aides Karl Rove and Joshua Bolten in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with subpoenas in the investigation of the fired U.S. attorneys.

The penalties for contempt are fines and possible jail time, but no punishment was ever handed down because a D.C. federal appeals court stayed the Senate's ruling in October 2008, while the White House appealed. Rove's lawyer claimed Rove did not "intentionally delete" any emails but was only conducting "the type of routine deletions people make to keep their inboxes orderly," according to the Associated Press.

By then, Obama was weeks away from winning the election, so the Bush administration basically ran out the clock. And neither the Obama administration nor the Senate committee pursued the matter.

At the time, some journalists and editorialists complained about a lack of transparency on the White House's part, but The Washington Post, in an editorial, accepted the White House explanation that the emails could have been lost due to flawed IT systems.

Like I said. It'll be here at least until next Tuesday. Enjoy.

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