-Caveat Lector-
October 3, 2000
Gore office accused of e-mail diversion
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
House investigators yesterday accused Vice President Al Gore's
office of hiding e-mail records by bypassing a White House
computer backup system that resulted in the loss of critical
messages over six years.
"There can be little doubt that the vice president's
advisers knew their actions would permit his office to operate in
a manner that would make it less susceptible to oversight,"
investigators for the House Government Reform Committee said in a
report to be released Thursday.
"In effect, they 'reinvented government' to stay above the
law and congressional oversight."
Investigators said a two-year probe by the committee found
that the vice president's office "took affirmative steps" to
avoid routing personal e-mail messages to and from Mr. Gore to
the White House's Automated Records Management System (ARMS),
including those sought by the Justice Department, independent
counsel Kenneth W. Starr and Congress in separate investigations.
The ARMS system was designed to allow the White House to
comply with subpoena requests and congressional oversight. The
report said the missing e-mail messages cover a variety of
topics, including campaign finance abuses.
Some of the missing Gore e-mail messages are being
reconstructed by the FBI, although House investigators said a
year's worth of Gore e-mail messages had no computer backup at
all, meaning any that were deleted "are lost forever."
Investigators said it was "highly likely" Mr. Gore or his
staff was responsible for the decision not to send the e-mail
messages to the ARMS system to prevent them from being turned
over to Congress, the Justice Department and the independent
counsel's office.
"It is clear that searches for e-mails in the Office of the
Vice President were incomplete. Only those e-mails that OVP staff
choose to print out or had saved on their computers could have
been retrieved," the report said.
White House spokesman Elliot Diringer dismissed the
accusations as old news.
"We haven't been given the courtesy of getting a copy of the
report, but we understand its contents already have been widely
publicized," he said. "It appears [Rep. Dan] Burton has stapled
together old press releases and, coincidentally, issued them a
day before the first presidential debate."
Mr. Burton, Indiana Republican, is chairman of the
Government Reform Committee.
Earlier this year, White House Counsel Beth Nolan
acknowledged to the panel that "much, if not all" of Mr. Gore's
e-mail messages had not been retrieved by the ARMS system, but
said it was "entirely unintentional."
Investigators, according to the report, urged Attorney
General Janet Reno to name a special counsel to probe the e-mail
matter, saying the Justice Department was representing the White
House in a pending lawsuit in the e-mail matter while conducting
a criminal investigation into the missing documents.
They also said the department had devoted insufficient
resources to the e-mail inquiry, had failed to interview a number
of key witnesses and that several White House officials,
including former Counsel Charles F.C. Ruff and former Deputy
Counsel Cheryl Mills, had obstructed justice and made false
statements in the e-mail probe.
Investigators also said Todd Campbell, counsel to the vice
president, "personally decided" that Mr. Gore would not store his
records "in a way that would permit compliance with document
requests."
They said e-mail users were told that they would be able to
search what was in their electronic mailbox at any given moment,
but they would not be able to produce records that had been
deleted.
They said the vice president's office "adopted a
prophylactic program to guarantee that fewer documents would
exist in the event the document requests were made."
Calls to Mr. Gore's office for comment were referred to Mr.
Diringer.
The committee, along with the Justice Department, is probing
accusations that the Clinton administration hid thousands of
e-mail messages sent to more than 400 White House officials
between September 1996 and November 1998, and that Mr. Gore's
office prevented both incoming and outgoing e-mail messages to be
captured by the ARMS system as required by law.
The report also said:
€ The White House knew that the e-mail problems discovered
in November 1998 meant there had been incomplete production of
documents to pending subpoenas, but senior White House personnel
"did nothing" to correct the problem until it was independently
discovered.
€ Mr. Ruff and Chief of Staff John Podesta "were clearly
told" about the e-mail problems and their statements to the
contrary were "implausible" based on available White House
records.
€ Northrop Grumman Corp. contract employees who worked on
the White House computer system, after they discovered the e-mail
problem, were threatened by White House staff to keep the matter
secret.
The Justice Department probe has focused on accusations that
the White House hid the e-mail messages after threatening White
House contract workers to keep the documents secret.
Campaign Finance Task Force chief Robert J. Conrad Jr. said
in court papers he wanted to know if subpoenas issued by his
office for the e-mail messages were "fully complied with" and if
Northrop Grumman employees were "threatened with retaliation" to
keep the messages from being turned over.
Northrop Grumman employees found the problem in May 1998,
which was traced to an August 1996 programming error. The problem
was fixed in November 1998.
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Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day.
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