Can’t they be both?
Do you think the Clinton Administration never lost any e-mails? Or other documents for that matter?
Surely the President/administration isn’t personally to be held “incompetent” because of record keeping systems? If so, I’m pretty sure every President/administration we have has had people in charge of records who screw up (and a lot of the people who are actually managing and keeping records aren’t political appointees and thus aren’t part of the “administration”, but just part of the Federal bureaucracy.)
I’ll never really understand this desire to insult or deride the current administration for stuff all administrations are guilty of; there’s enough stuff that this administration is uniquely guilty of before we start shelling them for record keeping errors (errors that even private companies regularly make–has anyone here ever dealt with the outcome of a record keeping error at their local utility company, credit card company, or et cetera? Happens all the time.)
Once any organization is large and complex enough, record keeping mess-ups happen. I don’t understand the desire to be vindictive about it.
I don’t know. But when I read your cite showing they lost millions of emails relating to major policy failings I’ll be in a better position to judge.
Of course you wouldn’t erase just the secret emails, that makes it easier to find. If you’re looking for a dozen missing emails you might find them, but if you’re looking for 5 million how will you ever know when to stop? The miniscule percentage of emails you need hidden are lost in the noise.
As for the last two years the only defence being offered by the White House and the Kool-aiders is the ‘Breathtakingly incompetent rather than just plain Evil’ defence I guess at some point they’ll admit that when Bush was trying to solve the whole Iraq funding problem and give a helping hand to a Nigerian General with banking problems he accidentally selected all 5,000,000 emails for deletion when going for the Reply button.
It could happen to anyone. He’s just a man not a super-being.
Maybe next time he’s chatting with God he could ask him to Undelete them?
4 million were titled “Super size ur P1N1$ WOW!!!”
And the depressing part is that all of those were sent from inside the White House.
Here’s a link to the Washington Post article in case anyone can’t get to the salon.com article.
This administration? Sure.
What blows me away is that I am in IT. And backing up a mail server is probably just about one of the most important things about my job. If that sucker crashes and burns, suddenly everybody is without their email, and a mob is outside my office with pitchforks and torches. I have automated emails that tell me if the backup worked. I have automated emails that tell me if the backup failed. I follow simple, step by step, industry wide practices to assure that I never lose any data, not just on my email server, but ALL of my servers.
I have more than once had to recover emails from years ago (Once I had to rebuild a Novell Groupwise server JUST to pull one accounts’ emails, weeeee). And the funny thing is, in the world of IT, I can readily admit that I’m a completely average geek. In the world of IT, nobody would look at my skill set and be that impressed. And I know that there are a hell of a lot of geeks out there that would happily take a job at the White House just to say to all the other geeks “Yep, I run the servers at the White House”.
Ya see, between you and me, every IT person secretly wants to brag about the shit they run. You got a Terabyte? Heh, well I’ve got two. You still run WINDOWS? etc., etc.
So I’m not buying it that some IT guy screwed the pooch and lost all that data (Even if they did overwrite the tapes, a lot of it can still be recovered at any number of data recovery shops). I just don’t buy it. It’s just such a basic part of IT. But if I was of loose morals and was asked to make a year’s worth of data disappear, I could do it. But it would take a while. I’d have to delete a lot of local profiles on laptops and call in all of my off-site backup tapes from the vendor. But I could do it. And I think that is what happened here. I just can’t see some clueless yahoo running things at the friggen Whitehouse.
Wow, Zero to “But Clinton” in 21 posts.
You’re getting slow.
-Joe
I’d bet they’re counting one email per person on a cc list. In that way, 5 million is nothing.
This all goes to show what happens when you hire IT guys on the basis of their service to the Party and their views on abortion. 
As Voyager said, when this administration won’t even schedule an interview with you unless the first line of your resume says, “I promise my body and soul to the service of The Leader, even unto prison or death, not to mention a little genital tonguewashing if asked,” one’s actual real-world qualifications tend to get somewhat glossed over.
Ummm…
Its probably a software issue.
In this case, wetware.
Today, I restored an e-mail from eight years ago that never actually hit the person’s e-mail in box, at work. It was from two different e-mail systems ago. I was not working at the job when it came in, nor were any of my available co-workers… the two who were, were at home on vacation.
This is beyond incompetence.
The story says Podesta ,Clintons assistant who ran the staff ,sent messages notifying the staff that all email was going to be saved. Not the same as Bush .sorry bad try.
Considering what the White House’s ultimate goal is, it might just be absolute competence.