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Obama White House Close to Settling Missing Emails Case
"We just got a stay from the judge to give us some room to try to work things out," says Meredith Fuchs, the general counsel for the National Security Archive. "It will take a while before we know whether our talks are successful because our ability to resolve the case depends on nailing down lots of details: what happened, was it fixed, and will it happen again."
The National Security Archive and CREW have been pushing the White House to disclose information about millions of missing emails for years. The case began in 2007, after the Bush administration warned that it may have lost millions of emails that should have been archived under federal record-keeping laws. That brought the lawsuit to force the recovery of the emails and the adoption of a better archiving system. Bush administration lawyers fought the plaintiffs tooth and nail, successfully passing the buck to the next administration and keeping secret the details of how and why the emails were lost. In January, the Obama administration became the defendant in the case, and at first showed signs of continuing the Bush administration's legal strategy, filing a motion to dismiss the case the day after the new team took office. It's unclear what the Obama White House is now offering. But, no doubt, its more than what the Bush administration ever put on the table.
The National Security Archive, which has sued every president since Reagan over electronic record-keeping, has settled email litigation in the past. Its agreement with the Clinton administration gave the nonprofit some oversight over how a new archiving system, ARMS, was set up, and the National Security Archive was largely satisfied with the results. But the incoming Bush administration, eager to adopt Microsoft Outlook for its emails, discarded the Clinton-era archiving system, which worked with Lotus, but not with Outlook. While Outlook was eventually adopted, no effective replacement for the Clinton archiving system was ever put in place. Any settlement with the Obama White House will likely include a promise from the administration to offer proof that it has implemented an effective way to manage email archiving, as required by law. Fuchs says she wants to know exactly what happened. If the settlement talks succeed, we may finally find out.
The White House has not yet responded to a request for comment.
8 Comments so far
Show AllI don't like it that a "solution" will be negotiated in private.
All the evidence to indict the Bush administration on ALL their crimes is contained in those emails.
Obama has already shown his hand: he's a weasel who cannot be trusted. He's protecting the Bush administration at all costs.
Nothing good happens in the dark.
I'd be willing to bet a credit default swap those emails are never made available for the public, uncensored.
No, it will be a handshake behind closed doors, kiss and make up and the Bush Gang will walk and the Obamians won't talk, and We the People can go skiing until the avalanche hits.
Behind those closed doors will be an undisclosed financial settlement and an agreement to keep everything confidential. Let's just hope there is a whistleblower in the wings. Otherwise it will be "All quiet in the Obamanation."
Sunshine is the best disinfectant. I would not take any settlement here that has a secrecy clause. That would be too ironic.
Joe
So the Bush fascists will get off scott free and Obama shows that he is just another high end player rather than the man of the people that he claimed.
What did they do to turn you Barack? What did they offer you or how did they threaten you for you to so easily sell out the nation?
We came so close to a fascist dictatorship. If these criminals are not punished, the next bunch will be more ruthless and more powerful. All it would have taken was one more trumped up terror attack and the suspension of elections. The next time we will not be so fortunate.
There MUST BE retribution. There MUST BE deterrent.
No deals. No settlements. Period. Pursue this thing right to the bitter end, by trial. We need accountability, and in order to be credible, we need to uphold the constitution. I am strongly opposed to any settlement that doesn't include accountability and consequences for the offenders. Period.
"In January, the Obama administration became the defendant in the case, and at first showed signs of continuing the Bush administration's legal strategy, filing a motion to dismiss the case the day after the new team took office."
This statement is misleading. It takes more than overnight to produce a creditable Motion to Dismiss. It's more like the missing "W's" on White House keyboards after the Clinton administration passed the torch than evidence of any Obama policy. The news of stays and negotiations is much more meaningful.
It relegates the article to a much lower status than if the whole bit has just been left out. It adds nothing truthful or even substantive to it.
There's as much knee jerk in the comments above as in the average neocon blog. I fail to see how compliance will prevent investigation, subsequent to which it would seem from my predelictions that there would be a prosecution. The suspicion of the possibility of coverups does nothing to promote justice being served. Part of our job as "the people" is to expect that it will. Are we so demoralized by the wingnuts that we cannot steadfastly expect proper formal action? Do they still preside as ghosts living rent-free in our minds? Hey! They're lying wounded on the sidewalk with nothing intelligible coming out of their mouthes.
Today Eric Holder dropped the corruption charges against ex-senator Ted Stevens on the grounds of "prosecutorial misbehavior".
So evidently that thing where Holder gave an "unofficial" opinion on pardoning Marc Rich was not quite so "unofficial" either.
The first one hundred days -- and the stink is already pretty noxious, from the refusal to go after Cheney & company on admitted war crimes to everything else.