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Crucial White House Emails Remain Lost

Files from '03 — at start of Iraq war — backed up, but where?

By Katherine Thompson,  Newser Staff

Posted May 7, 2008 10:57 AM CDT
Email

(Newser) – White House emails from March-September 2003—the first few months of the Iraq invasion—still have not been found, the Washington Post reports. An advocacy group is suing for the release of the emails, and federal law requires such high-level communications be preserved. Officials, still searching, say the data might have been mislabeled, and could yet be retrieved from disaster-recovery tapes.

"We're talking about the White House, and documentation of our history that may be lost," says a representative of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the group bringing the lawsuit. The administration contends efforts to save emails "yield marginal benefits at best, while imposing substantial burdens and disruptions" on the White House.

Looking for critical Iraq-war emails among stacks of backup tapes is proving as hard as finding a needle in the White House.
Looking for critical Iraq-war emails among stacks of backup tapes is proving as hard as finding a needle in the White House.   (Flickr)
White House Office of Administration Chief Information Officer Theresa Payton, testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington in a hearing on electronic records preservation at the White House.
White House Office of Administration Chief Information Officer Theresa Payton, testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington in a hearing on electronic records preservation at the White House.   (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
White House Office of Administration Chief Information Officer Theresa Payton, left, and Archivist of the U.S. Allen Weinstein, testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
White House Office of Administration Chief Information Officer Theresa Payton, left, and Archivist of the U.S. Allen Weinstein, testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.   (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
If the White House can't find all the missing emails, documentation of a critical period in US history will simply be lost.
If the White House can't find all the missing emails, documentation of a critical period in US history will simply be lost.   (Flickr)
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ZDNet

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email • White House • servers • disaster recovery • Iraq war • Theresa Payton

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