Destroyed email records may not be recovered before Bush leaves office

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During a technical and tense Congressional hearing, the testimony of current and former White House officials and the head of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) revealed a possible explanation for the loss of millions of White House email records.

Previous investigations revealed the Bush administration removed the White House email archiving system put in place by the Clinton administration, and failed to replace it. Instead of implementing a standard archiving system like the ones used by businesses or other Federal agencies, the White House set up a procedure that amounted to taking email records and manually storing them on a hard drive.

The Bush archiving system was characterized as "primitive" by Steven McDevitt, a former information technology specialist in the White House Office of Administration. In 2002, McDevitt warned White House lawyers and administrative staff the stopgap system of manually archiving records was deeply flawed because an individual user could tamper with the records without leaving any evidence of their malfeasance behind.

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