You don’t have mail

Sunday, Aug. 24, 2008 | 2:08 a.m.

Hundreds of thousands of e-mail messages from the White House are missing, yet the Bush administration has made little effort to find them.

The e-mail is missing because the White House was slow to put in a records management system, and the system it did put in apparently didn’t capture all the right information. That has become a convenient excuse for the Bush administration to dodge Congress and prosecutors. For example, e-mail related to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the illegal naming of CIA agent Valerie Plame are among the missing documents.

E-mail is important because it is public record and could contain evidence of illegal activity. The White House has known about the missing e-mail for several years but has dragged its feet. The White House only recently sent out a request for contractors to bid on the job of sorting through old backup tapes to take a look.

How much e-mail is missing is unclear. The White House now says it is missing no more than 225 days of e-mail, but in 2005 it estimated it was missing 473 days’.

The change may be because the White House has limited the scope of the search without saying why. Computer experts say it may not matter much because the White House computer system wasn’t designed to back up every e-mail, resulting in a large number of “missing” messages.

In other words, it is doubtful this “search” will amount to much of anything. And just to make sure, the Bush administration is allowing a contractor to conduct the search until April 19, 2009 — 89 days into the next president’s tenure.

The Bush administration has a long track record of hiding documents and withholding information, so it is no surprise that the White House is continuing to obstruct access to public records. Congress should press the administration to finish this work before the end of the president’s term.