-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- From: http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49554-2000Mar30.html White House to Recover Missing E-Mail By George Lardner Jr. Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, March 31, 2000; Page A08 The White House said yesterday that it will undertake a $3 million effort to restore thousands of missing e-mail messages and search them for information that should have been produced during criminal and congressional investigations of the Clinton administration. White House counsel Beth Nolan said the inspection of about 4,025 backup tapes containing records from the offices of the president and the vice president should be completed in approximately 170 days. Under that timetable, the effort should yield all previously subpoenaed evidence by late September, in the midst of the fall campaign. Nolan told the House Government Reform Committee at a daylong hearing that the restoration will be conducted in batches so that any relevant records can be turned over in "a rolling production" to the independent counsels and congressional committees that demanded them. The matters covered by subpoenas served on the Clinton White House in recent years ranged from campaign finance abuses and the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal to the deadly 1993 confrontation at Waco and President Clinton's controversial grant of clemency last year to imprisoned Puerto Rican terrorists. With the committee's GOP majority expressing sharp skepticism, Nolan said "no one attempted to hide responsive information from this committee or from any other investigative body." She said the "computer glitches" responsible for the failure to keep an archive of incoming messages sent to more than 500 White House employees were the result of "unintentional human error." A huge quantity of e-mail to and from Vice President Gore and his staff was never properly recorded and so was never reviewed to determine if any of it was relevant to the investigations of alleged 1996 Democratic fund-raising abuses. Nolan said the e-mail to be retrieved is contained in 3,400 backup tapes at the White House and 625 at Gore's office. Northrop Grumman Corp. employees who operate the White House e-mail system testified last week that when they discovered that 2� years worth of incoming e-mail had not been searched to comply with the subpoenas, they were told to keep the problem a secret. One said he was warned there would be "a jail cell with his name on it" if he told anyone. The two White House officials involved denied making any threats. The gravity the White House attaches to the controversy was underscored at yesterday's hearing by the unprecedented attendance of the president's confidant, deputy White House counsel Bruce R. Lindsey, who sat in a front row, occasionally volunteering information and advice. The Justice Department, by contrast, was represented by Robert Raben, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, who exasperated committee Chairman Dan Burton (R-Ind.) by saying "I don't know" and "I have no idea" to almost every question. "What are you doing here?" Burton finally protested. "You subpoenaed me," Raben replied. The Justice Department disclosed in court papers last week that it has launched a criminal inquiry into the mishandling of the e-mails, but Rep. Robert L. Barr Jr. (R-Ga.) said he suspected this was done "simply to thwart" the House committee's probe and discovery in the civil lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, a conservative group that uncovered the e-mail gap. The Justice Department frequently cites its own pending investigations to deflect congressional and civil inquiries into the same matters. Northrop Grumman employee Robert Haas, who discovered that e-mails involving Lewinsky were missing in June 1998, alerted his superiors, who told White House counsel Charles F.C. Ruff about the problem. Nolan said Ruff told her he did not realize the missing e-mails indicated a larger problem because the unarchived Lewinsky messages had already been turned over to investigators after the searches of individual computers. Haas saved the results of his search in his computer and recently put them on a special disk that is safeguarded at the White House. Nolan said White House officials "couldn't read all of it" and have made another copy in hopes the copy will work better. Judicial Watch contends this action violated U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth's order to keep the evidence under seal. However, White House spokesman Jim Kennedy said "we believe" the judge's order was directed only at the backup tapes. � 2000 The Washington Post Company ================================================================= Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT FROM THE DESK OF: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> *Mike Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ~~~~~~~~ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day. ================================================================= <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soap-boxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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