Asymmetrical Information

It shouldn't even have to come to forensics. They knew they would have to keep these emails indefinitely, so their email servers should be set up to back email up--regardless of the users desktop actions. There should be some sensible backup plan in place--offsite tape backups. Losing 4 years of email is surely a sign of IT incompetence (or worse) given the requirements for their email services.

I'm still waiting for the Clinton White House to turn over Al Gore's missing e-mails related to the Buddhist Temple fundraiser. Remember how they worked feverishly for more than 6 months but just couldn't possibly produce them before the November election in 2000? But they promised that the subpoenaed e-mails would be turned over soon after the November election, and that was the last I heard of them. If anyone knows whether they were ever turned over, please let me know.

Bless you Ann! On point without any nastiness.

Ah Ann you know the GW Bush has been President for the last 6 years right? Ultimately the response to doing wrong isn't to point out that your other people have committed wrongs therefore your are ok.

"Remember how they worked feverishly for more than 6 months but just couldn't possibly produce them before the November election in 2000?"

You know GWB won that election right?

Thank you, Caveat Bettor.

Brian - I still would like to know what happened to those e-mails. Do you know?

This new fuss about e-mails ('secret RNC shadow e-mail accounts') reminds me of the fuss over Al Gore making fundraising phone calls from his official office, which I thought was overblown at the time. It was technically against the rules for him to make fundraising phone calls while sitting at his official desk, using his official phone, but I thought that the whole thing was petty. As I recall, he paid for the calls, so it wasn't a question of actual cost to the taxpayer, merely of his physical location at the time he made the calls.

Al Gore got slammed for simply using his office telephone for some fundraising calls, and the result is that many White House aids have to have two e-mail accounts, to avoid doing anything political from their official e-mail addresses. And now we're shocked that they would have "secret RNC accounts"! Both sides are trying to score cheap points in ways that could lead to problems in the future.

The missing Gore e-mails, on the other hand, were part of what I thought was an important investigation. Regardless of who won the election, why shouldn't the Clinton administration have to respond to subpoenas? Or maybe they did, eventually, and it just never got covered in the media.

Well Karl Rove constant use of RNC email account (By some accounts 95% of Karl's email usage was on RNC accounts). The scope of it is what's different.

"Or maybe they did, eventually, and it just never got covered in the media."

Actually this happened I believe but I don't have Lexis NExis access right now. Anyone?

I am generally pretty forgiving of organizations that manage to lose e-mail, for one major reason: dealing with computer system backups (or, more often, the lack of them) is part of my job. And it's the part that nobody ever wants to address. Ever.

Nobody wants to spend money on backup hardware, backup software, backup personnel, disaster recovery testing, and all those many and varied tasks that need to be done to (a) save data and (b) make sure you saved the right data. Until a vital piece of data actually goes away, nobody wants to hear about it. But when a vital piece of data does go away, everybody wants to know why it hasn't been recovered yet, no matter how many times over the past six months they've been told that the expected recovery time for what they want is now up to 96 hours (and they can't have it back at all if it's been gone more than 30 days).

Even among organizations that do have a clue about backups, e-mail backups are the red-headed stepchild. Much of the time, in the business world, e-mail backups are explicitly required to be deleted after a short period of time because of the legal implications of retaining them -- and if the White House hired IT guys out of the business world, they may well have internalized that philosophy. Even if they did their best to back them up and keep them, they may have been screwed by any number of unintentional errors -- I've seen companies flush away literally millions of dollars because the cabling from a server to a tape drive was faulty (and nobody ever bothered validating the blank tapes the drive kept spitting out as "backups"), or because the backup software configuration wasn't writing to the proper location (ditto).

People who've never had to deal with running a backup regime for a major IT infrastructure have no idea how many niggling little mistakes can completely destroy your chances of recovering any given piece of data, in spite of your best efforts. While I'm prepared to believe that this problem is a result of malicious intent, my professional opinion is that there's more than adequate reason to think it was incompetence, inadequate resources, or just plain dumb bad luck -- and anyone with a shred of honest nonpartisanship who's ever worked in backup systems management will agree.

I blame the little elves in the computer who store all the information. They should've known better. Oh well!

I wonder how many people actually believe that they didn't know what they were doing with their computers.... "We're just so clumsy with this stuff. Sure, you can trust us to intercept terrorist transmissions, but I can't figure out my dell." I'm sure they can just call customer service, right?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Karl Rove is the one who is intercepting terrorist messages. Also correct me if I'm wrong again here, but generally executives do not setup their own computers. So when someone gives Karl a computer and his MS Outlook has "remove deleted emails from server" checked, then it will remove deleted emails from the server without him ever knowing about it.

No one wants to open an email box that has 10,000 emails sitting in it. So I imagine he deletes them once he's through and if the IT at the White House had their act together they'd be storing the emails on the server.

Anyone else noticing the non-scandal after non-scandal that's coming out these days? It would appear to me as if the Democrats are doing everything they can to look for some reason to impeach or at least make the case that the could impeach but want to take the high road...

Waterboarding could be a good excuse for *losing* the emails. "Um, we brought in a data-recovery technician from the CIA."

cdub has a good point. The Democrats promised to provide "oversight" of the President, which means constant investigations and hearings. From now through the next election, their main role will be to investigate everything and subpoena everyone, both in the hopes of eventually stumbling onto something and in an attempt to convince people that something must be wrong, simply because of the constant investigations.

But this is hardly a surprise, which is why Gonzales deserves the heat he's getting. He knew that the Democrats would pounce on the slightest discrepancy, and yet he and his people weren't coordinated and prepared. They provided an opening by not handling it right from the beginning.

The Scooter Libby conviction has given Democrats a guide on how to create a scandal. Even if there's no underlying crime, if you put people under oath and ask them about minor details from months earlier, there are bound to be some differences in people's recollections, which apparently can lead to perjury convictions. Pretty much anyone can be Scootered, if they agree to answer questions under oath.

Some of you seem to be under the false impression that Rove deleted emails that were supposed to be protected and backed up. He did not.

There is a White House email system that keeps and files all email from or to any White House email account. It worked. What Rove did was refuse to use it, as required by law, for his duties as deputy White House chief of Staff.

He is trying to excuse his behaviour by saying that he didn't want to be accused of using official email for party business. I don't believe him. He avoided using the official system specifically because he did not want his activities to be recorded. Not only was Rove aware of the rules restricting which email system he might use in his official capacity, it was his duty (which he actually fulfilled) to make others aware of these restrictions. He knew the rules, taught them to others, then violated them.

I think its probably fair to say that if he used an alternate system it was due to a combination of the following:

1. Who wants to login and check 2 email addresses? I do for two seperate jobs I have and I only get a couple emails a day. I am also raised in the comptuer generation and comfortable with this stuff.
2. He legitimately did not want to get accused of emailing from his white house account for partisan purposes so he said, fine I won't use that account.
3. He probably also didn't like the idea of Democrats using the courts to be able to read his emails for the sole reason of political use.

They wanted to dig through his emails to find some evidence to use against him for political purposes. This guy is not the evil nazi people make him otu to be.

The law is that you are required to keep emails. I work for a large corporation and no matter what we delete, the email is backed up.

I don't want to impune Karl Rove but it is awfully suspicious that he sent 95% of his emails from an RNC address when he was a full time white house employee.

Oh, and I have four email systems going at all times for my job (I have to monitor two company mailboxes, my personal work mail box, and my personal personal mail box) and I manage to not get confused just fine. Karl Rove is a bright guy, I am sure he could manage.

Gonzoles absolutely deserves what he is getting. Karl Rove deserves what he is getting. The lack of transparancy, the changing of the stories. Something may not have happened (after all, when the republicans went after the Clintons in exactly the same way, all they found out about was that Bill lied about a B.J.) but I want to confirm that fact and right now I'm really not sure that's the case.

Oh, and I'm tired of people saying Scooter Libby didn't do anything wrong. He was convicted of purjury. I find it interesting that in one of the other threads above there is a moral outcry about stealing tickets off a dead guy but lying under oath is okay because the guy you like did it.

It is NEVER okay. It wasn't okay when Clinton did it, it's not okay when Libby does it and it is ABSOLUTELY not okay if it turns out that Gonzoles or Rove have done it (especially the AG)