Constitutional Law

White House Claims To Discover Lost E-mails

The groups involved in the ongoing legal battle with the White House to recover millions of e-mails for historical preservation are somewhat flummoxed over the Justice Department’s claim that e-mails the White House has maintained were missing for four years have been recovered. The Washington Post reported today that hours after a federal judge ordered White House employees to launch an exhaustive last-minute search for the e-mails, a Justice Department attorney said 14 million White House e-mails had been discovered. The newspaper reported that the Department claimed it spent $10 million on recovering the 14 million e-mails from 2003 to 2005. Meredith Fuchs, the National Security Archive’s general counsel, said in a press statement that, “From the beginning, the White House has changed its story from ‘emails are missing’ to ’23 million emails were found’ and back to ‘no emails are missing.’ The truth is, neither we nor the public can verify the White House’s efforts because they continue to conduct themselves under a veil of secrecy.” Last year, ACS distributed an Issue Brief by Fuchs regarding the controversies surrounding the Bush administration’s handling of presidential records. The Issue Brief is available here.

Full post as published by ACS Blog on January 15, 2009 (boomark / email).