CREW Posts Additional Missing White House Email Documents Released by Administration

In CREW v. Executive Office of the President,
CREW's lawsuit regarding the millions of emails missing from Bush White
House servers filed September 25, 2007, the White House recently released
documents from three more of 38 boxes assembled by the Bush White House
as potentially responsive to CREW's FOIA request. The White House has
now released documents from eight of the 38 boxes over the last two
months. This latest release consists largely of spreadsheets and charts
created by the White House team assembled in 2005 to investigate the
missing emails problem. The team analyzed the emails the
White House had preserved for each section of the White House,
conducting a component by component analysis. The most recently
released documents (OAP00013868-OAP00021275)
formed the basis of a chart - completed in February 2006 but not
released until two years later - showing 473 days on which no messages
were preserved, and 229 days on which the number preserved was
suspiciously low.

The latest release also includes documents showing the problems the
White House had finding emails from the Office of Vice President (OVP)
sought by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald during his investigation
of the leaks that led to the disclosure of Valerie Plame's identity. In
one document, for example, a member of the team voices concern that
"there seem to be a lot of days for which was there little email" (OAP00015820), and another document instructs members of the team to "drop what they are doing" to do a spot check of OVP files (OAP00016403).

As with previous releases, most of these documents appear to be
copies of documents the Bush White House provided the House Oversight
Committee several years ago. Some are marked "sensitive" meaning they
are not subject to public disclosure.