Perhaps, it’s just fanciful thinking on my part but I can’t help but believe that the walls are slowly closing in on the White House, regarding the missing emails. Their latest [highly improbable] explanation for the millions of missing emails from the RNC servers (that they weren’t suppose to be using in the first place) isn’t helping their cause at all.
First, as many of you know, I’ve done four prior diaries on this vexing subject. It’s hard to believe that this is my fifth but, as we all know, the omniscient Dkos "search" function never ever lies.
Anyway, those diaries are here, here, here and here. (in order)
Testifying at Henry Waxman’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in late February, Theresa Payton, the chief information officer for the White House Office of Administration, told the committee that White House emails "sent and received between 2003 and 2005 fell into a virtual black hole" when the Bush regime transitioned from using Lotus Notes to the Microsoft Outlook Email Exchange.
Given Payton’s umm... creative excuse, Republican Congressman Darrell Issa of California decided she was on to something and immediately accused the Democratic leadership of trying to embarrass President Bush. According to Issa, Payton’s succinct outrageous testimony solved the mystery of the missing emails once and for all. But, he failed to address the fact that the disappearance of many of the electronic communications coincided with some of the Bush regime’s higher-profile scandals, like the Supreme Court’s decision involving the vice president’s energy task force documents, the Plame affair, and the more recent firing of at least nine US attorneys.
I finally found a story written by Jason Leopold @ Thursday’s OpEdNews.com website:
Issa stated unequivocally that Payton’s testimony confirmed that the missing communications were not the result of deliberate malfeasance by the White House or negligence by the administration’s technology staff, but simply a computer glitch that ensued when the White House wanted to phase out an archaic email program.
In an exchange with Payton, Issa characterized Lotus notes as "wagon-wheel" technology.
"I wouldn't want to do business with somebody still using Lotus Notes or still using wooden wagon wheels," Issa responded. "If I understand correctly, though, certainly I checked with the House of Representatives, we can no longer support it for members who want to stay on it."
Now, for middle-aged computer geeks, comparing Lotus Notes to "wagon wheel" technology is analogous to comparing a brand spanking new Dell XPS 630 Desktop to a 1970’s era Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor).
In other words: it’s blasphemy.
The excuse is laughable. (to be kind)
According to several email technology geeks, trying to say that switching from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook email system is responsible for the "disappearance" of millions of emails exhibits rank ignorance on the part of Payton and disingenuousness [at best] from Issa . In fact, shortly after the late February hearing, several Lotus Notes aficionados contacted Ed Brill, an executive at IBM, who specializes in the LN software.
Brill quickly concluded that the way Payton and Issa characterized his Lotus Notes would indeed be bad for business -- and faced with the potential PR nightmare – he knew he had to set the record straight.
In a blog click here maintained by Brill, the IBM executive wrote that calls from users and "partners" of Lotus Notes became so "dramatic," and created such a terrible public relations problem for the company that he was forced to call Congressman Issa’s office and demand that he amend his testimony about Lotus Notes.
"The sequence of events that followed that was quite dramatic for me, even after 20 years in the industry," Brill wrote in a March 23 blog post. "I ended up on the phone with [Issa]. I have received a letter from the Congressman, which I hope to publish in the next week or so. The hearing testimony will also receive an amendment clarifying the intent of the commentary about Lotus Notes."
In a brief interview, Brill said he was not authorized to speak on behalf of IBM, but said he found it "suspicious" that the White House had not recovered "old data" prior to the switch from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook He added that he could not provide me with a copy of Issa’s letter because it contained confidential information about Lotus Notes software. However, Brill said that Issa agreed to amend his testimony to reflect that "Lotus Notes is a viable product" and that he erred when he characterized it as "wagon-wheel" technology. (my emphasis)
Issa’s office did not return emails or phone calls for comment.
There’s still an argument between computer experts who believe that Bush regime officials have simply been incompetent in the archiving of emails and those who believe they knowingly destroyed the data to cover-up illegal acts. However, all arguments dissipate as far as believing officials like Issa and Payton, trying to blame the en masse disappearance on the implementation of a new email archiving technology.
Former computer science professor, David Gerwitz, has written more than 600 articles about email. He recently published a book on the White House email controversy crime, "Where Have All the Emails Gone". Gerwitz believes that Payton and other administration officials have not been incompetent at all, but rather have "played fast and loose with the facts," especially when it comes to the bloated cost of recovering the lost emails and the time it would take to perform the endeavor. Gerwitz added that Payton has knowingly misrepresented "the cost to manage data recovery by at least and order of magnitude," and has done so in an attempt to "dissuade Congress from pushing for recovery."
Back in February, Payton claimed the total cost of recovery would be at least $15 million. Payton filed a sworn affidavit last week with U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola, saying the White House shouldn’t be forced to undertake such a monumental search for the missing emails because it would be too time consuming and very expensive.
"That's just plain silly," Gerwitz wrote in an article published in the February issue of Outlook Power Magazine.
"We're talking about mounting a tape or a disk and running a program," Gerwitz wrote.
"You can buy an IT guy for nearly a year for $50,000. But if it takes that IT guy a full year to run one restore, that's a dude you need to fire. Also from the Wildly Exaggerated Claims Department, Payton said it would cost $500,000 to buy the servers to do the restores. That's quite off the mark. I just checked with the Dell site. A nice PowerEdge server with 4GB of RAM and four one-terabyte hard drives is $4,377. A half a million bucks will buy you 114 of these servers."
In response to a show cause order issued by Judge Facciola, Payton stated that the White House had a "refresh policy" resulting in the destruction of its hard drives every three years "in order to run updated software, reduce ongoing maintenance and enhance security assurance." As a result of this policy, Payton added, it’d be unlikely that any missing emails would be found.
However, it remains unclear whether the so-called "refresh policy" was ever implemented, and it hasn't been disclosed who at the White House was responsible for drafting such a procedure. Neither Payton nor her aides would respond to repeated requests for comments.
One thing is clear though, a spokesman for the National Archives, Susan Cooper, said in an interview that her agency doesn’t have the power to force the White House to comply with the Presidential Records Act.
"One thing you have to remember the key thing to remember about presidential records is that it doesn’t become ours until the end of the administration," Cooper said. "The National Archives does not have any say or legal input until the end of a president’s term. It’s up to the president to decide how he manages his records. However, federal records are a different story. We have input into that immediately. If we believe a federal agency is violating the Federal Records Act we will write a letter to the agency and ask for an explanation and if necessary we will refer the case to the Justice Department."
Cooper indicated that the National Archives has no intention of referring the matter to the Justice Department. No doubt an exercise in futility.
However, Allen Weinstein, Archivist of the United States, said the National Archives did at least write a letter to the White House last May when reports about the extent of the missing emails began to surface.
"Because the [Executive Office of the President] email system contains records governed under both the Presidential Records Act and Federal Records Act, on May 6,2007, the National Archives sent a standard letter to [ Alan R. Swendiman] the Director of the Office of Administration (PDF) requesting a report on the allegations of unauthorized destruction of Federal records," Weinstein told the House Oversight Committee in sworn testimony last month. "While we have not received a written reply to the May 6 letter, we have been diligent in requesting an update on the status of the White House's review of these allegations and the possibility of missing Federal and Presidential emails, the White House has responded regularly that its review is still continuing. Furthermore, we have made our views clear, both to the White House and to this Committee, that, in the event emails are determined to be missing, it would be the responsibility of the White House to locate and restore all the emails, probably from the backup tapes, and that such a project needs to begin as soon as possible."
However, Terry Sweeney, a columnist with InformationWeek, believes that is where the case should end up.
In a column InformationWeek published Monday, Sweeney said Payton’s disclosure involving the destruction of hard drives "sounds improvised—very lately improvised."
"Normally, a reasonably sensible storage professional makes sure all necessary data was properly copied," Sweeney wrote. "And normally new applications -- whether it's an e-mail server or the backup system for it are tested and re-tested before anything gets destroyed. But this situation isn't normal, and the story behind the story keeps changing, or getting added to, like one of those serial chain letters that clutter your inbox. Earlier on, I was willing to give the White House and [chief information officer] Theresa Payton the benefit of the doubt about this mess. My suspension of disbelief about this is officially suspended."
I talked to a rather geeky friend of mine yesterday and he told me that he’d be very surprised if the emails in question (between March 2003 and October 2005) aren’t on backup tapes somewhere. And, I won't go into all the techno-jargon because, frankly, I don't understand it all that well myself, but he said that those emails could be recovered if the judge ordered copies of the hard drives made immediately.
As far as the cost of such a recovery operation, he told me that Payton is definitely exaggerating (to be kind) the cost of such an operation, saying with the copies, he could recover all the missing emails in less than an hour at a cost of less than a thousand dollars.
If that's true, "exaggerating" is a gross understatement.
Stay tuned... I have a feeling a sixth diary is in my future.
Peace