The cover-up attempt has been stopped, for now:
“The missing records at issue span critical events in U.S. policy, including the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the Abu Ghraib scandal, release of a congressional report detailing the flawed intelligence that was relied upon concerning weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the handling of Hurricane Katrina. If the deletions go beyond 2005, they may also involve records concerning the renewal of the highly controversial U.S.A. Patriot Act, a major administration initiative concerning immigration policy, and the White House role in the firing of a number of U.S. Attorneys. These are the kinds of records that the Federal Records Act seeks to preserve because they document our history and facilitate an informed American public.”
The White House has blamed the “loss” of these e-mails on an “outside IT contractor”; but investigation has already shown there is no such company under contract. Witnesses have already privately told Congress that during an e-mail transition from one type of server (IBM/Lotus) to Microsoft Exchange, there were major conversion problems; while they were still in the process of fixing this, the IT workers were suddenly ordered to stop all work, then just to dump all of the old e-mails into an unorganized storage dump. Rather than being caused by any legitimate problem, the White House essentially created an extra one, in order to make the old e-mails as inaccessible as possible. It won’t hold up, either legally or technically, unless appeals judges decide that Bush will be held to a different standard of e-mail accountability than Clinton’s or George W. Bush’s administrations.
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