-Caveat Lector-
E-Mail Special Counsel Sought
CNSNews.com
Friday, Oct. 6, 2000
A congressional committee is asking for the appointment of a
special counsel to investigate the circumstances surrounding
hundreds of thousands of missing White House e-mails.
A 140-page report released Thursday by the House Committee on
Government Reform stated that "a special counsel is needed to
investigate obstruction of justice and perjury charges" against
White House and Justice Department lawyers for not correcting
what the committee called "false deposition testimony" from an
administration computer specialist.
Suspicion on Gore
The report casts a suspicious light on Vice President Al Gore,
whose office is accused of configuring the Office of the Vice
President e-mail system in such a manner that it "would not store
his records in a way that would permit compliance with document
requests," according to the report.
"There can be little doubt that the vice president's advisers
knew that their actions would permit his office to operate in
such a manner that would make it less susceptible to oversight,"
the report continued.
In fact, a reconstruction of a fraction of the missing e-mails by
the Federal Bureau of Investigation showed a number of notes
indicating that Gore may have known more about the 1996 Buddhist
temple fund-raising event than he previously testified to.
One message noted in the committee report stated that the "the
vice president was committed to do a fundraising event in Los
Angeles on April 29, 1996."
That particular e-mail, dated April 9, 1996, was called
"significant" by the committee because there was "no mention of
an event at another venue - a direct contradiction of
representations that a separate fundraising event had been
scheduled and then cancelled at the last minute."
Further complicating matters is that federal law requires that
all government records be preserved through the White House
Automated Records Management System, otherwise known as ARMS.
The committee report claims that Todd Campbell, a lawyer on
Gore's staff, "personally decided that the vice president would
not store his records in a way that would permit compliance with
document requests," and accuses the Office of the Vice President
of "re-inventing government to stay above the law and
congressional oversight."
Because so many e-mails were not stored in the ARMS system, the
committee concluded that Gore's office "appears to have adopted a
prophylactic program to guarantee that fewer documents would
exist in the event that document requests were made."
According to the committee report, the White House e-mail system
failed to archive correspondence between September 1996 and
November 1998, making it difficult if not impossible for the
administration to fully comply with subpoenas and requests for
documents in campaign finance investigations and the independent
counsel inquiry that culminated in the impeachment of President
Clinton.
Historic Implications
The significance of the e-mail failure was noted in the report
with historic implications.
"If senior White House personnel were aware of these problems...
then the e-mail matter can fairly be called the most significant
obstruction of congressional investigations in US history," the
report said.
"Hundreds of thousands of e-mails were never reviewed to comply
with subpoenas," said committee Chairman Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind.,
in a statement Thursday.
"And I'm not just talking about this committee's subpoenas. I'm
talking about Justice Department subpoenas. I'm talking about a
court order from a federal judge."
Burton dismissed reactions to the e-mail controversy as a
"tempest in a teacup," saying the missing correspondence creates
"a documentary trail of events as they unfold. In the computer
era that we live in, you can't conduct an investigation without
reviewing e-mails."
Among the charges included in the committee report are
allegations that White House officials not only threatened
private sector workers contracted to find and fix problems with
the e-mail system, but also forbid those workers from taking
notes on their work and consulting with their supervisors.
At least one employee of Northrop Gumman, the company that
worked on the e-mail problem, was threatened by a White House
staff member "with jail if he disclosed the existence of the
problem," according to the report.
Burton's committee said this intimidation resulted in inquiries
by Congress and other federal agencies being "obstructed in their
legitimate investigations," as well as increasing the taxpayer
costs of all the investigations by dragging them out.
White House officials were also accused of showing "disregard
for the welfare" of Northrop Grumman staff by not letting them
discuss their work on the e-mail system with their supervisors.
White House aide Mark Lindsay earlier said he didn't want
workers discussing the information "around the water cooler," but
the committee concluded that there was "no legitimate reason to
keep Northrop Grumman employees from consulting with the
superiors."
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