CREW (Committee for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) is suing the WH for refusing to comply with its FOIA request regarding five million apparently missing e-mails generated between March 2003 and October 2005.
Yes, that’s five million. Stories here and here. How the hell could the WH lose five million e-mails?!
What are they about, I wonder? What does that time-frame suggest?
Will CREW win the suit?
Five million e-mails ÷ 32 months = 156,250 e-mails per month or about 5,200 per day.
Yowzah.
I know. It astounds me that even the WH can generate that many in a day. But then, it’s a big country and a big government.
Who knows? Have you ever worked in a big office building? Five million emails isn’t very big, to be honest. I’m one person and I get about 100 business related emails per day.
If it was some sort of deep, dark, evilll conspiracy I don’t think there’d be anywhere near 5,000,000 emails about it. The White House (West Wing) has hundreds of employees with personal computers, and “the White House” could also include the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (where many members of the President’s staff work because the office has outgrown the West Wing, which was built during the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt.)
5,000,000 emails generated over a 2 year period by hundreds and hundreds of staffers is probably only a small portion of the the total number of emails the “White House” deals with. I wouldn’t be surprised if that is only a small portion of the monthly email load. IT systems aren’t perfect, a lot of emails probably aren’t kept forever.
It’s entirely possible, of course, to hide emails you don’t want getting out by making sure they get lost. But it’d be even easier to just claim executive privilege, this is just an FOIA request, lots of stuff is immune to FOIA requests, this isn’t like an investigation by a special prosecutor who has authority to get access to documents which private entities normally can’t get access to even through FOIA requests.
(Also, both of the stories you linked didn’t load up for me.)
I just clicked the links and they both worked. Try again.
Really? Take 100 staffers, each one generates 50 e-mails in one day. If the stories you linked to worked I may have a better idea about what they mean by “White House e-mails.” Does it mean e-mails sent to White House workers by other government officials? Any e-mails received by White House staff? Only e-mails sent out by White House staff?
How reasonable it is depends on how we define “White House e-mail.” If it is simply “how many e-mails does a person who works for the executive send + receive in a day” then 5,000,000 is pretty reasonable. Because the President has way more than 100 staffers (the Executive Office of the President has around 1,800 employees–and there are a few organizations outside the EOP that work out of the White House, or the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.)
I haven’t a dog in this fight, but they work for me.
Try c&pasting them into a browser window, sometimes that works.
I’ve done that, they still won’t load. 
I keep getting the message, “Firefox can’t find the server at www.citizensforethics.org.” I’ve even tried just going to the main site itself instead of the articles BG linked to, and www.citizensforethics.org doesn’t load for me, either.
Yea, it’s not that many, it’s a small percentage of the whole. Only the ones that cover things they are being indicted about.
Can you perform a RICO investigation about your own government?
Do you have any factual basis for that assertion? I still can’t get BrainGlutton’s links to work but I found another website that reported on the story here, and there’s nothing in there that suggests anything one way or the other about the content of the missing e-mails. The article seems to suggest CREW’s biggest problem is that the Office of Administration has poor record-keeping policies and CREW believes it should be rectified. But I’m not 100% sure from the article I found if that is their motivation or not.
Only if you view the government as an ongoing criminal organization.
Suppose I compose an e-mail and send it to 10 people, and two years later no trace of the e-mail can be found. How many e-mails should be reported as missing? Furthermore, if they are indeed missing, how can the number be accurately tallied?
Those are the questions I have as well. If a Deputy Assistant in the Office of Management and Budget sends out e-mails to three friends working in the White House Office of the Executive Clerk inviting them to lunch, is that three e-mails or one? If all three respond is that six total e-mails? Four total e-mails?
Look, the problem here is that the WH is required by law to keep good records and treat them as public property. Congress passed the Presidential Records Act in response to Nixon’s arrogance about “his” records and tapes. So the mere absence of records that should be there is, in and of itself, a smoking gun. And so is the use by WH officials of a non-WH domain name.
Perhaps your DNS has blacklisted them? 
As this is a press release intended for public dissemination, I think it’s safe to reproduce it here. A GD mod will correct me if I’m wrong, I’m sure. This is link 2:
Link 1 is about the release of the report referenced in the second paragraph.
The WH’s only defense lately for all these scandals seems to be that they’re just massively incompetent and forgetful. See, they’re not evil and planning all of this behind the scenes…they’re just really, really bad at that whole government thing.
Why can’t it be both?
Martin Hyde I could prove it, but the e-mails that do that are missing. 
Just certain factions within it are criminal organizations.
It’s definitely a smoking gun, procedurally, that the OA has bad record keeping.
I’ve not seen anything to suggest the 5 million e-mails are lost because of intentional malice versus just simply bad IT policies. It’s a bit unreasonable to act like any problems with e-mail record keeping in an organization that very likely sends and receives hundreds of millions of e-mails per annum is evidence of something “bad.” Should the OA improve its record keeping? Sure. And from what I see, that’s CREW’s real desire here.
Calling it a “smoking gun” of anything except bad record keeping is a bit spurious. Like I said, a great many things can be labeled “FOUO” (For Official Use Only) and such info is generally very difficult to get disseminated by FOIA requests–and this is a common practice going back many administrations before people suddenly leap to more excoriations of Bush.
It’s unlikely if Bush/the Administration was really talking about something illegal, they would share it in the form of 5 million e-mails. (Insert comment about the administration being both stupid and somehow capable of managing multiple conspiracies against the American people here)
I would actually agree, if this had come out at a different time. However, this is surfacing within the spectrum of various scandals and “potential” scandals. This inherently throws an extra coat of suspicion over everything.
LilShieste
So they’re either deeply nefarious or wholly incompetent at administration.
This is a defense how?