-Caveat Lector-
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35591-2000Oct28?language=printer
White House E-Mail Gap May Yet Cause Crisis
By George Lardner Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday , October 29, 2000 ; Page A08
After the news broke last February that a glitch in White House
computers had resulted in the administration's failure to review
more than two years' worth of e-mails covered by independent
counsel and congressional subpoenas, the White House said it
would do its best to produce any relevant evidence before the
November election.
Now, more than six months later and just a few days before
Election Day, it is clear that the vast bulk of the messages �
including many to and from Vice President Gore � won't begin to
get a thorough review until after the voters choose a new
president. Nothing in the way of a smoking gun has emerged from
the thousands of e-mails that have been reconstructed and
reviewed so far, but hundreds of thousands more remain to be
examined.
Meanwhile, an unusual series of evidentiary hearings before U.S.
District Judge Royce C. Lamberth into the e-mail breakdown is
nearing conclusion. Lamberth has heard from 19 witnesses in his
inquiry into the White House's failure for more than a year to
tell him it had not reviewed potentially important information.
Lamberth, who is presiding over an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit
growing out of the White House's improper acquisition of FBI
background files, will determine whether the administration's
actions are so egregious that he should move ahead with
contempt-of-court proceedings. And independent counsel Robert W.
Ray is conducting his own separate criminal investigation into
"possible noncompliance" with the subpoenas issued by his office.
While Lamberth has made clear that he doesn't like what he has
heard so far, he has yet to make a decision. New issues keep
coming up that prevent him from concluding the hearings, most
recently allegations that a key witness, a former White House
associate counsel, deceived him.
The White House defends its initial handling of the computer
glitch and says it has been doing its best to restore the
e-mails, but the proceedings have provided new ammunition to
those who believe the matter represents "the latest in a long
string of actions meant to thwart congressional and criminal
investigations focused on the White House," as the House
Government Reform Committee put it in a report this month.
When news of a problem with retrieving archived White House
e-mail surfaced earlier this year, President Clinton himself �
after being briefed about the computer problem � asserted that
"we are in full compliance" with all subpoenas.
White House Chief of Staff John D. Podesta agreed in testimony
this month that Clinton went too far in making that claim but
held firm to the position that there had been "good-faith
compliance" with all subpoenas. "We have not intentionally
withheld anything from anybody," Podesta said. "We're trying to
do the best we can."
Republicans regard the failure to report the missing e-mails, a
problem that came to the attention of White House lawyers in June
1998, as symptomatic of what they consider the administration's
cavalier attitude toward complying with subpoenas. Rejecting the
idea that the e-mail gap is just "a tempest in a teacup,"
committee chairman Dan Burton (R-Ind.) said that "in the computer
era we live in, you can't conduct an investigation without
reviewing e-mails."
The tedious work of reconstructing the remaining messages will
remain in the hands of the White House and its contractors unless
Lamberth replaces them with court-appointed experts or unless, as
the White House now suggests, the National Archives takes over
the assignment.
After a sluggish start, White House contractors have now copied
and put into searchable form more than half of some 4,000 backup
tapes and are continuing the effort under a $13.2 million
appropriation that will not run out until the fall of 2001.
White House spokesman Elliot Diringer said discussions with the
Archives are now underway with the aim of making sure the search
for relevant evidence continues, no matter who wins next month's
election.
Most of the e-mail consists of incoming messages to the Clinton
White House, but there is also a huge amount of two-way traffic
involving Gore and top aides � the only ones in the White House
whose outgoing as well as incoming messages were never properly
recorded until this spring.
The e-mails from Gore's much-used laptop � the vice president is
known for reading more than 100 a day and sending out almost as
many � were also kept out of the permanent White House archive
set up in 1994 to preserve such correspondence, and until
recently the Gore messages were stored only on voluminous backup
tapes.
The hearings in Lamberth's courtroom are continuing with the
questioning of former White House lawyers. Judicial Watch, a
gadfly conservative group that brought the FBI files lawsuit and
discovered the missing e-mails, persuaded the judge to conduct
the fact-finding inquiry after an affidavit the government gave
him last year about the White House system for saving the
messages contained no mention of how many had been lost.
The sessions began July 31 when Sheryl L. Hall, a former White
House computer operations supervisor, told of a 1998 conversation
she had with then-White House associate counsel Michelle Peterson
about telephone records Judicial Watch was seeking. Hall said
Peterson told her they weren't going to turn over the records
because "the strategy was to stall. There were only two years
left to go."
Peterson denied saying that. She has been a chief witness at the
hearings because she conducted a "test" of e-mails involving
Monica S. Lewinsky in June 1998 when the White House counsel's
office was first told of the problem. Peterson checked a freshly
printed stack against those that had already been turned over to
prosecutors and found them to be duplicative. Former White House
counsel Charles F.C. Ruff testified that this led him to
conclude, erroneously, that his office had nothing to worry
about. He overlooked the import of a memo telling him there were
"uncaptured messages" dating back to 1996.
Peterson recently made some corrections in her e-mail testimony
in light of material shown her at a grand jury appearance in
September, and independent prosecutors have since raised other
questions about her statements to Lamberth. A Reagan appointee
who has been critical of the Clinton administration in other
cases, the judge said he would call Peterson back to the stand
Tuesday.
Little has been said at the hearings that wasn't disputed or
denied. The affidavit that Lamberth said misled him was signed
July 9, 1999, by White House computer specialist Daniel A. "Tony"
Barry, the architect of the system that was installed in 1994 to
make a permanent record of White House e-mails. Although he had
known for more than a year of the glitches, Barry told the court
that since 1994, "e-mail . . . has been archived" and "is
susceptible to being word-searched."
Asked why he didn't mention the hundreds of thousands of messages
that couldn't be searched, he said he saw no need to do that
because he was describing the system and not its failures. He
defended the affidavit because he hadn't said "all e-mail" had
been archived.
Lamberth was not impressed. "You cannot read that [affidavit] in
the preposterous way he [Barry] was telling me," the judge told
government lawyers. "No fair-minded person can read that in that
way."
� 2000 The Washington Post
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