Maybe They Can Impeach Him For THIS
The Bush administration, having trampled the Bill of Rights, lied to Congress and the American People, launched a horriffic and obscenely costly war under false pretenses, overthrown the governments of a couple sovreign nations, eviscerated social programs, lined the pockets of powerful business interests, invaded the privacy of ordinary citizens, fomented ethnic, racial and religious tensions… and so on… well, now there’s the question of some “lost emails”. Could this be the thing that finally (please, please, please) lands Georgee W. Bush in jail?!
This article on ars technica has excellent analysis of the situation, both from a technical perspective and from the legal angle.
The gist of it is this: A 1993 Federal law requires the White House to retain all Administration records and communications, including electronic records and communications… which includes emails.
In response to the law, the Clinton Administration installed a perfectly serviceable Lotus Notes-based system, which included an automated archiving system.
In 2002, the Bush Administration (perhaps in accord with its tendency toward medieval policies) decided to replace the Notes-based system with a Microcoft Exchange-based system, with no automated archive capability, and decided to hire a person to manually sort and move emails to “.pst” files. How could that be flawed?! Yeah, let’s replace an objective, dispassionate automated system with a wage-slave with uncertain motives and proclivities.
Idiots.
So, apparently, for the bulk of the Bush Administration, they’ve been “archiving” emails by MANUALLY dragging and dropping emails into various inconsistently-named “.pst” files, scattered on various servers located who-knows-where.
I wonder what motivated them to shift from a functional IBM system to a kludgy Microsoft system…. hmmmm