New Info in CREW Lawsuit Reveals 89.4% of Bush-Era Emails Were Never Archived

Last Friday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington
and the National Security Archive (the Archive) sent another follow-up
letter to Archivist David S. Ferriero with the final results of a
comparison the White House conducted between archived emails of the Bush
administration for 21 non-consecutive days and the emails restored from
backup tapes for those same days. An earlier comparison,
which was jettisoned after the White House revealed it was conducted
using a completely flawed methodology, had shown an 83% discrepancy,
suggesting 83% of the emails for those 21 days would have been lost to
history but for the restoration process CREW and the Archive demanded of
the White House in settlement of their lawsuit, CREW, et al. v.
Executive Office of the President, et al. The latest comparison
revealed an even greater problem with the Bush White House's process for
archiving its emails - 89.4% of emails restored from backup tapes
for the 21 selected days were completely missing from the Bush archived
email records for those same days. Further, 3.9% of emails in the
archived records for those days were not found on backup tapes,
indicating yet more problems with the system the Bush White House used
for archiving its electronic records. Based on these very disturbing
results and the many flaws in the methodology used by the Executive
Office of the President, CREW and the Archive reiterated to the
Archivist their request that all of the missing Bush-era emails be
restored.

Click
here to read CREW and the Archive's letter.