May 1, 2000
White House E-mail Furor Rages
Filed at 7:41 p.m. EDT
By The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The White House is raising the possibility it
may invoke executive privilege to keep Congress from seeing some
documents in the controversy over missing e-mails that are under
subpoena, documents disclosed Monday.
Meanwhile, investigators are poring over memos suggesting
presidential aides could have begun retrieving the missing
messages more than a year ago to see if they should have been
turned over to investigations ranging from Whitewater to
impeachment.
The White House sent the House Government Reform Committee, which
is investigating the controversy, a one-page list of documents it
is not turning over under subpoena because they are considered
covered by executive privilege and attorney-client
confidentiality.
Among the documents on the list, which was obtained by The
Associated Press, are handwritten notes by White House lawyers
involving discussions they had with computer experts about the
e-mails.
The list says the notes ``reflect mental impressions'' of the
lawyers for the White House Office of Administration, which
oversaw the e-mail system at the center of the controversy.
The list is the first step in the executive privilege process. In
past investigations, the White House has sometimes relented and
turned over documents and in other cases they invoked the
privileges to shield memos.
The decision prompted an angry reply Monday by the chairman of
the Government Reform Commmitee.
``The White House is obstructing the investigation,'' Rep. Dan
Burton, R-Ind., said in a letter to the White House counsel's
office. ``This meaningless legal mumbo-jumbo is obviously a
transparent ploy to provoke wasteful and time-consuming squabbles
over documents.''
A White House spokesman, Jim Kennedy, responded: ``We have
already turned over a lot of material to Mr. Burton. What he is
seeking is not historical information about the origins of this
problem but current information generated only as a result of his
inquiry.''
Kennedy added that the White House ``would like to reach an
accommodation with the committee to provide them with what they
legitimately need in a way that doesn't interfere with our
ability to do our job.''
Meanwhile, the AP obtained an internal memo showing that
presidential aides prepared to notify Congress as early as
February 1999 about a glitch in their e-mail system and to begin
retrieving thousands of unarchived messages that might be
relevant to investigators. But they never followed through.
The February 1999 memo, which included talking points for
possible testimony before congressional appropriators, laid out
the history of the e-mail problem that has now become the focus
of criminal investigators.
The memo disclosed that presidential aides had solicited a
proposal on Oct. 20, 1998, from contractor Northrup Grumman to
``recover the missing records'' that weren't properly archived
because of the glitch.
``The approximate cost for the system design is $602,000,'' Karl
H. Heissner of the White House Office of Administration wrote.
Officials, however, didn't divulge the existence of the glitch to
Congress or prosecutors.
Instead, they waited until this year to begin retrieving the
missing e-mails and reviewing them to determine if they should
have been handed over to lawmakers and federal prosecutors who
had subpoenaed documents in the Monica Lewinsky, political fund
raising and Whitewater investigations.
Heissner's memo also suggests he was reluctant to tell Congress
about the status of official document requests to the White House
-- both from lawmakers and ``litigants against the government''
-- because statistics showed such requests were declining.
``We may not want to call attention to the issue by bringing the
issue to the attention of Congress because ... the level of
requests appears to be declining,'' Heissner wrote.
He added for emphasis, ``Let sleeping dogs lie.''
The memo is expected to play a key role in hearings later this
week before the House committee.
White House officials blame a ``disconnect'' between their
technicians, who diagnosed the e-mail problem, and their lawyers,
who apparently did not understand that the glitch might affect
pending subpoena requests.
Kennedy, the White House spokesman, said Heissner's memo showed
that aides to President Clinton never intended to hide the
problem and were prepared to answer questions about it.
``We have seen no documents that in any way suggest that the
e-mail problem was hidden from Congress,'' Kennedy said.
Still, lawmakers, Independent Counsel Robert Ray and Justice
Department officials are trying to determine whether the delays
in retrieving e-mails and informing investigators about thousands
of possibly relevant documents was part of an effort to obstruct
various investigations of the president. The White House denies
wrongdoing.
Ray's prosecutors this week plan to interview one of the White
House contractors involved in the discovery of the problem, Betty
Lambuth, according to the Judicial Watch, the conservative legal
group that is representing her. Lambuth has alleged she was
threatened by White House officials not to divulge the problem.
AP Online news report
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