White House failing to meet record-keeping obligations Commentary
White House failing to meet record-keeping obligations
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Anne Weismann [Chief Counsel, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, CREW]: "The White House's recent refusal to provide assurances that it is preserving back-up copies of the millions of missing emails is clearly part of a larger, more concerted effort to hide information from the public. Other examples include the knowing use of RNC non-governmental email accounts by top White House officials to avoid having their emails captured by the White House's electronic record-keeping system and the Bush White House's failure to restore millions of email records deleted from White House servers. Almost from the outset the Bush presidency erected a wall of secrecy around the White House, fighting efforts to open up to public scrutiny the process the vice president used to formulate energy policy, taking a very aggressive stance on the reach of executive privilege and declaring wholesale categories of records off-limits under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Most recently, the White House went a step further when it declared that the Office of Administration (OA), a component of the Executive Office of the President, is no longer an agency subject to the FOIA, thereby reversing the course it had followed since the OA's inception.

It is against this backdrop that CREW, contemporaneously with the filing of its lawsuit against the White House for violations of the record-keeping laws, sought assurances that all back-up copies of the millions of deleted White House email records were being preserved. After all, it was the White House's own OA that had proposed using these back-up tapes to restore the deleted records, a recommendation that the White House ignored. The White House's duty to preserve the only remaining copies of an important body of historical documents for future public access is clear under the law. Nevertheless, the White House has decried this obligation, arguing in response to CREW's request that it need only save those back-up tapes in its possession as of the date that CREW filed its lawsuit, September 25, 2007, and that this obligation stems from its discovery obligations under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

The White House has effectively renounced the Federal Records Act and the Presidential Records Act, laws that obligate the White House to have an effective electronic record-keeping system in place and to restore the millions of deleted emails. As a nation of laws, we should be offended by the cavalier disregard shown by the White House toward its record-keeping obligations."

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