http://www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_sperry_news/20000419_xnspy_did_h
ouse_.shtml
ALL THE PRESIDENT'S SCANDALS
Did House panel fry good guy?
Memos reveal Burton's e-mail perjurer acted more
like the hero of Project X
By Paul Sperry
Wednesday, April 19, 2000
© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com
WASHINGTON -- The White House official singled out by a
House committee for wrong-doing in the Project X e-mail
fiasco was the one official who consistently lobbied
higher-ups to fix the problem, memos obtained by
WorldNetDaily reveal.
The House Government Reform Committee last month sent
the Justice Department a criminal referral for perjury
against White House Computer Specialist Daniel "Tony"
Barry. It's been turned over to the campaign-finance
task force for review, a Justice spokesman says.
Panel chairman Dan Burton, R-Ind., asked Justice to
prosecute Barry for allegedly lying in a 1999 sworn
statement. He claims Barry falsely certified that White
House e-mail had been properly archived, when it hadn't.
In fact, the White House failed to record -- and search
under subpoena requests -- more than 1 million e-mails
and attached documents sent to at least 526 staffers,
including President Clinton and his top aides, as well
as to at least 200 staffers whose first names start with
the letter "D." The gaps span a period from August 1996
to May 1999.
What's worse, nearly all e-mail to and from Vice
President Al Gore and at least 24 of his staffers has
been omitted from archives.
High-level White House officials have known they had, at
minimum, an isolated e-mail records-keeping problem as
early as January 1998. And they've known of a systemic
problem since June 1998, when Northrop Grumman computer
contractors diagnosed it and alerted them.
Yet they elected not to tell Congress, Justice, a
federal court or the Office of Independent Counsel about
the yawning gap in records -- even though the
investigative bodies had subpoenaed the White House for
e-mail relevant to their various probes of White House
scandals.
Major news about Project X broke two months ago after a
former White House official and non-government computer
technicians blew the whistle in court affidavits.
But Burton may have put the wrong White House official
on the hook for the mushrooming scandal.
If there was one official who didn't cover up the gap,
it was Barry, internal White House memos show.
He repeatedly sounded alarms over the problem -- namely
the failure of the White House computerized archiving
system, known as ARMS, to capture e-mail coming into the
critical "Mail2" server used by Clinton and other West
Wing officials.
"This is a followup to our discussions on Tuesday
regarding 'the mail2 problem' or project X," Barry began
an Aug. 13, 1998, memo to Jim Wright, one of his
superiors in the White House Office of Administration.
"As far as I can tell, there is no movement under way to
fix the problem and recover the lost records from the
backup tapes," Barry continued. "I feel that the records
must be recreated and any searches need to be
reperformed if the requestors feel it is necessary.
"This seems like a daunting proposition but I do not see
any other alternative," Barry said. "I feel that I
cannot walk away from this problem."
He closed by saying: "I appologize[sic] for the rambling
nature of this memo but I hope it captures my concerns
and frustration level."
In a Sept. 10, 1998, memo to Wright and Kathy Gallant,
another Office of Administration official, Barry wrote:
"I am growing increasingly concearned[sic] about the
seeming lack of movement on the Mail2 problem."
"Do you know where the hold up is.[sic] We have known
about this problem for 4 months now and not a single
record has passed to ARMS," Barry complained. "[E]ven
worse, the root problem has not been fixed."
Then a clearly frustrated Barry, who was the computer
expert in charge of White House records projects,
followed up with another memo on Sept. 25, 1998.
"It has been about 2 week[sic] since I sent my last
'concerned memo' regarding the mail2 problem and I am
still not seeing any movement on fixing the problem," he
wrote to Wright and Gallant. "I need to know, for my own
sanity, exactly what my role in this project should be."
'Trouble reports'
In December 1998, Barry even came up with a cost
proposal for fixing the problem. "Mail2 reconstruction
(Project X) ... 99 cost ... 650,000 ... 2000 cost ...
1,000,000," read a line item that Barry typed in a
spreadsheet that included cost estimates for other
projects.
It apparently went over like a lead balloon.
Barry was ordered by the Office of Administration's
budget department to "remove the 'project X'
designation" from the spreadsheet.
By March 1999, Barry was still nagging his supervisors
about e-mail archiving problems.
"It has come to my attention that when the 'bleeding'
was stopped on MAIL2 in November 1998, ALL the bleeding
may NOT have been stopped," he wrote in a March 18,
1999, memo to Office of Administration Project Manager
Devere Patton and other officials.
"I have spoken with [Northrop Grumman e-mail
administrator] John Spriggs and it appears as though at
least one account, MILLENNIUM [a possible Y2K-related
account], may still have the problem," Barry added.
"I believe NG [Northrop Grumman] should be instructed
to investigate."
White House records obtained by WorldNetDaily show that
Barry also fired off "trouble reports" regarding e-mail
archiving on Feb. 1, 1999; Feb. 9, 1999; Feb. 11, 1999;
and again on May 5, 1999.
Hero of Project X?
It was Barry, moreover, who first stumbled on the
archiving problem -- long before the Northrop Grumman
workers.
In January 1998, while conducting a keyword search of
ARMS in response to a subpoena request, Barry noticed
that some incoming e-mails to one White House account
were missing.
He had Spriggs check the log of the firewall system,
which screens Internet messages for viruses. Sure
enough, outside e-mail got through the fire wall to the
Mail2 server but never made it to the ARMS scan bucket,
where incoming and outgoing, as well as internal White
House, e-mail is stored on the VAX mainframe for easy
searching.
Barry documented his findings in an incident report and
sent it to the White House lawyers who feed him search
requests.
Records show Barry was on top of another previously
undisclosed e-mail anomaly in early 1997.
In a March 4, 1997, memo to Charles Benjamin, Laura
Crabtree Callahan and other Office of Administration
officials, Barry asked for advice on a problem involving
"10,000+ lost E-mail records." Whose e-mail was lost is
not clear from the memo.
Perjury or parsing?
Burton asserts that Barry filed a false declaration
assuring a federal judge there was no problem with the
White House e-mail system.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, hearing a $90
million Filegate lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch Inc.,
wanted to know more about White House efforts to turn
over e-mail under subpoena in the case.
Judicial Watch Chairman Larry Klayman also said that
Barry "submitted a false affidavit claiming that there
was no e-mail problem."
Actually, Barry didn't go that far in his July 9, 1999,
statement, which he signed under "penalty of perjury."
He said, "Since July 14, 1994, e-mail with the EOP
[Executive Office of the President] system administered
by the Office of Administration has been archived in the
EOP Automated Records Management System (ARMS)."
He didn't say there was "no problem." Nor did he say all
e-mail has been archived.
Still, Barry misled the court, Burton says, by omitting
any mention of Project X from his statement.
"That's perjury," Burton said.
Is it? The law is not so black and white.
The sections of Title 18 of the U.S. Code that cover
perjury do not expressly say omitting facts is a
punishable offense.
But Sec. 1621 states that anyone who in a "declaration
or statement under penalty of perjury willfully
subscribes as true any material matter which he does not
believe to be true, is guilty of perjury."
Then there's Sec. 1001 that says it's a felony for
anyone to provide to a court a statement that
"falsifies, conceals or covers up by any trick, scheme
or device a material fact."
Perjury carries a maximum prison sentence of five years.
Calls to Barry's White House office were not returned.
Justice says the perjury referral is in the hands of the
campaign-finance task force, which is trying to grab
control of the e-mail probe from a federal court hearing
lawsuits against the White House.
"It's been forwarded to the task force for their
review," Justice Department spokesman Myron Marlin told
WorldNetDaily.
Klayman posits that Burton is really just trying to
squeeze Barry in the hopes he'll finger political
operatives above him.
"He may be making him walk the plank," Klayman said.
Indeed, Burton has said that lawyers at the White House
and Justice may have coached Barry in writing his
misleading, if not perjurious, statement.
A June 8, 1998, memo from Barry to Wright and Gallant
reveals that Justice lawyer Jim Gilligan and White House
lawyer Sally Paxton had asked Barry to "set aside
Tuesday and Wed[sic] as preparation days" for his
deposition in the Filegate suit.
Paul Sperry is Washington bureau chief for WorldNetDaily.
Previous stories:
Document backs cover-up charge
Are e-mail tapes safe?
Smoking gun in the e-mail?
Inside job on e-mail
'The fix is in' on e-mail fix?
Firm won't take hit for Project X fiasco
Memo: More e-mail missing
Gore's e-mail MIA for next 6 months
More signs of obstruction as judge nears decision
Perjury charges at White House?
E-mail whistle-blower's office was burglarized
White House killed 'Project X' story?
© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com, Inc.
.
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