22 Million Missing Bush White House Emails Found 326
ctmurray writes "Computer technicians have found 22 million missing White House e-mails from the administration of President George W. Bush, and the Obama administration is searching for dozens more days' worth of potentially lost e-mail from the Bush years, according to two groups that had filed a lawsuit — which has now been dropped — over the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic record-keeping system. Earlier we discussed the Obama White House's opposition to the lawsuit that led to this discovery." The related links reflect our discussions about the missing emails over two years.
Standard IT issues (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, those stupid liberal groups are just out to hodgepodge the truth again. All we did was violate 2 federal laws by not keeping records of our communications, and had insanely incompetent I.T. staff at this, the richest and most powerful country in the world. What a bunch of baloney. Just an honest mistake. Tens of millions of e-mails, big whoop. Wanna fight about it?
Re:Love the spin (Score:5, Interesting)
> No, because the Bush/Cheney administration are incredibly talented at
> pulling one of the biggest conspiracies in the history of the US while
> being inept, ignorant, uneducated, stupid, and a horrible public speaker.
Bush may or may not have been inept; on that we will actually will have to wait for the verdict of history. Cheney was however one of the most stunningly successful senior executives in US history, getting more of his agenda accomplished than any other President except FDR and possibly more than him as well (so much is still classified so we don't and may never know). To call Cheney "stupid" or "inept" is, well, foolish.
And if it is impossible for a large group to keep a secret in Washington DC, answer me this: besides Libby, Addington, and Yoo, who were the other 37 members of Cheney's staff from 2001-2009? Oh wait, their names, salaries, titles, and duties were kept secret for 8 years, Cheney used his self-granted power to classify the information secret, and it never leaked. Nor did the members or agenda of Cheney's 2001 oil conference ever leak. Again, after the events of 2002-2006 to say it is not possible to manage a secret concerted effort in DC is foolish.
sPh
Re:Love the spin (Score:5, Interesting)
Bush may or may not have been inept; on that we will actually will have to wait for the verdict of history.
Then you aren't the type of person/attitude I was sarcastically aiming at :)
To call Cheney "stupid" or "inept" is, well, foolish.
I agree.
And if it is impossible for a large group to keep a secret in Washington DC, answer me this:
It's certainly not impossible; and while investigating is fine and I don't have a problem with that, many seem to run rampant with conspiracy theories based on nothing more than the fact that they don't know (even though with some of them, we probably do know, but it doesn't suit their particular political bent - whether R. or D.).
I was primarily venting because I get tired of - and not you, apparently - various people attacking Bush (or Obama, for that matter) as being both exceedingly cunning/educated/knowledgeable-about-everything-going-on and stupid/ignorant/high-school-dropout. Slightly exaggerated, depending on who you talk to. "My" side - since conservatives tend to be Republicans - do it with Obama, too. Obama is well on his way, apparently, to turn the US into a Muslim country, to completely ruin the country economically and to ruin health care, all the while being ignorant, inept, and completely inexperienced.
I actually disagree very strongly with Obama on many issues... unfortunately, when many people disagree, they get angry; and when angry, they apparently don't think rationally and start accusing of even contradictory things....
Re:20 million? Hard to believe! (Score:5, Interesting)
That happens when you change from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange.
It is amazing that this many were recoverable at all.
Perhaps someone in IT considered the possibility that the
migration to Exchange would fail, and kept feeding all of the
e-mails to another set of servers for, you know, safekeeping.
Re:20 million? Hard to believe! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Love the spin (Score:5, Interesting)
Brilliant analysis. I would also add that you have to factor in Karl Rove retaining his e-mail account and Blackberry on the Republican National Committee server, which was not covered by the Presidential Records Act, for use in his role managing the Republican Party, and then conveniently "forgetting" to switch back to his White House userid when he handled e-mail related to official government business in his government-salaried job. Potentially including the routing of classified information through the non-secure RNC system.
sPh
I knew this was coming (Score:5, Interesting)
I knew this was coming when I first heard about the White House scrapping their previous GroupWise based email archiving system, as they were switching to Exchange, and deciding to roll their own archiving system.
Thanks to Sarbanes-Oxley, email archiving is big business now and you can buy enterprise ready solution from the likes of EMC.
Instead they decided to have a private contractor roll a custom system, spent a couple hundred million and 2 years, and then scrapped it for not working right (scrapped by the White House CIO).
In the end they implemented an EMC solution, right before Bush left office.
They can pull the wool over non technical peoples eyes, but I have no doubt they purposely FUBAR'ed this, there was no reason not to go with an industry standard solution from the get go unless they were up to no good.
Supporting facts: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20080417/chron.htm [gwu.edu]
Re:TWO DAY OLD NEWS (Score:1, Interesting)
If what you say is true (and I note that 7 digit ID of yours), then Slashdot's tagline should read "Discussion for nerds. Stuff that matters."
Years ago Slashdot was a cutting-edge source for nerd-worthy news. It's long-since been surpassed by other news websites. Today it's really just a shadow of its former self.
Re:Love the spin (Score:2, Interesting)
Re-reading, though, I still think there's a problem; if Cheney was so good at keeping these things a secret, you'd think his secret-keeping IT staff would have deleted the e-mails from backups, too, as WyattEarp said.
Even I would have done that if I were trying to cover up something that badly.
Something, at least, seems fishy there.
I'll contribute to the conspiracy theories!
Perhaps 18 months was how long they needed to sort through 22 million emails and remove any traces of illegal activity. Now that the emails have been sanitized, they have been miraculously "found".
Or, perhaps the provided reason for discovery points to why these email were not deleted... they were mislabeled as backups for a different system and thus never destroyed by the Cheney-ites. We may be days away from announcements of indictments against the Bush Administration!
Or, maybe the IT Staff were just incompetent and these emails will ultimately be meaningless.
This is fun!
Re:Love the spin (Score:4, Interesting)
I love the spin that is being put on this: "found", "technical problems", etc. - esp in the Washington Post. These e-mails just happened to have technical problems and get "lost" when 10 of the senior members of the Bush/Cheney Administration where under investigation concerning a conspiracy to violate foreign intelligence secrecy laws. Just happened to get "lost", yessirree.
sPh
If you talking about the Valerie Plame thing, it turns out that there was no cover up because it wasn't the administration that leaked the name. Remember Dick Armitage [cnn.com]?
However, I will say that the administration didn't want an investigation into that leading to something else. I remember another president was being investigated for something he was cleared of (Whitewater) and ended up getting into trouble from something completely unrelated (Lewinski).
Re:TWO DAY OLD NEWS (Score:1, Interesting)
I think we're half agreeing. But only half.
As I mentioned, I noticed your high ID number. I started reading Slashdot in the late 90's, when this site NOT ONLY provided excellent discussion, BUT ALSO cutting-edge news. (I'm on the road right now and consequently not logged in.) And I mean fresh news, not stories that other sites picked up a few days ago (not that there were many sites with equivalent audiences back then, but there were some). The volume of material that I found engaging here on Slashdot was enormous. Unless you were around back then, you really can't appreciate how much it's dwindled. During the dot-com years, I had no problem sitting at my desk 9-5, reading as many Slashdot news stories and discussions as time allowed -- as "research" related to my job, of course (hey, this WAS the dot-com era!).
Sure, Slashdot has the occasional great discussion even today. But not at the volume it once did, and it certainly isn't as fast to post news stories as its competitors are today. And I suspect you and I both know that the lag is not a result of high-quality editing taking place behind the scenes before stories are carefully posted! ;-)
I'd argue that the stories posted by Rob Malda over the past few years show that even Slashdot itself is aware of the lighter readership. But I'm not going to go digging up those stories 'cause it's late here. Well, there is the subject of the recent "Idle" category. I don't think many are going to disagree that that's primarily a foray into attracting more eyeballs in an effort to appease advertising demands, no?
Re:Love the spin (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember that Patrick Fitzgerald said he could not complete his investigation because of the conspiracy to obstruct justice, and that there was "a cloud over the Office of the Vice-President"? Remember that Novak testified that Armitage leaked the information to him, but that in no way proved that Armitage was the only person who leaked information, or even that Armitage was the first to leak? Remember the notes in Libby's handwriting on the typed minutes of his meetings with Cheney?
I am so happy that I don't know the level of raw hatred and paranoia to continue to blame someone for a crime AFTER someone else has confessed (Armitage), that confession has been confirmed (by Novak) and the case has been closed.
Just HOW smart? (Score:1, Interesting)
They were collectively extremely smart at getting the nation to think a war of choice was a necessity...
The sad fact remains that it wasn't a difficult sell. Most Americans are drooling imbeciles who wanted an excuse to blow up teh dirty Evil foreigners.
What I consider interesting is that the majority of people in nations outside the USA thought the planned "war" was a very stupid thing to do, and knew that the justifications being put forward were completely bogus.
Hmmm.. (Score:2, Interesting)
You are smoking crack. (Score:1, Interesting)
if you will take the time to read the Constitution, you will learn that it is not the executive branch at all that controls the economy, but the legislative branch.
The president appoints the Fed chairman. And the Fed sets interest rates, which to a major degree "controls the economy".
So blaming Bush/Cheney or Obama/Biden really just shows ignorance.
Actually, your fourth-grade summation of how the economy works shows ignorance.
I don't know if you old enough to remember, but just a few years ago, the economy was going gang-busters.
It certainly was NOT. It was in a MASSIVE BUBBLE. But not just any bubble-- it was a bubble in which jobs creation stagnated, and those jobs that were created were poor-paying jobs. It was also a bubble in which the primary beneficiaries were the very, very rich.
The entire "gang-buster" economy was revealed to be entirely illusory-- a fantasy economy which was built on lies, fraud, greed, and a lack of regulation enforcement from the industry-corrupted executive branch. (oh, there's that executive branch involvement again!)
When Bush took over, there was a slight recession, 9-11 made it worse, then one hell of a boom. The economy was going so well that the US government took in record tax receipts even *after* Bush's"tax cuts to the rich" (I got a tax cut. I had no idea that 50k/yr made you rich!)
Golly Gee Whiz! You got a tax cut! I got a tax cut! He got a tax cut! She got a tax cut! Everyone gets tax cuts. Woohoo! Money for everyone! Since Republicans are very concerned about the deficits, I wonder how these cuts were paid for? What's that? They weren't? 1.3 trillion paid for... not at all? Just like everything else Bush crammed through congress... Sweet. Oh, and we had a budget surplus at the time-- you know, something we need to pay off the deficit in the first place.
Well those went right out the window. See, the executive branch proposed a series of budgets (and a few wars) that also fucked our economy in the ass.
Then the economy tanked. What changed?
The bubble had been building during Bush's entire administration. It was created by the Fed after the previous bubble popped. It was facilitated by wall street and the administrations "ownership society" fantasy. The bubble was well-known to exist by most saltwater economists and warnings were rampant. But the free marketers didn't listen.
Alan Greenspan himself has acknowledged his role and misguided libertarian philosophy.
As others have pointed out, this bubble had to do with Congress only insofar as they removed every legal barrier and regulation that was designed to prevent such abuse of the system from happening. The laws that protected the economy were hollowed out throughout the 80s and 90s, but by Bush's 2000s, the now sick, rotten economy was allowed to fester and bubble and finally collapsed under its own weight.
Here's another hint, it rhymes with congress. The same party that took over congress then is still in control, and what do you know... the economy is still in the tank.
Here's a hint for you: You're an ignorant douche. The Democratic Congress and Bernanke SAVED the economy. Barely, but they saved it. This year's stimulus was too small and had too many tax cuts to support a strong comeback, but it did keep the economy from turning into 1933. You can thank Keynes for that as much as Bernanke.
How the hell anyone marked you as informative is beyond me.
Re:Love the spin (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Never really missing... (Score:3, Interesting)
A conspiracy is when two or more people enter into a secret agreement to do something illegal. This happens ALL THE TIME. No doubt everybody here has been involved in at least one conspiracy. You can barely get through adolescence without it. That everyone now has a knee-jerk reaction to think of anyone talking conspiracy is crazy is a coup for corruption.