CREW alleges that millions of White House emails are missing.
CREW alleges that millions of White House emails are missing.
http://citizensforethics.org/node/27607

. . . Executive Office of the President (EOP) has lost over five million emails generated between March 2003 and October 2005. The White House counsel's office was advised of these problems in 2005 and CREW has been told that the White House was given a plan of action to recover these emails, but to date nothing has been done . . .
. . . two confidential sources independently informed CREW that the administration abandoned a plan to recover more than five million missing emails . . .

Of course, this isn't a crime, nor even unethical, because the Clinton White House also lost emails (well, not MILLIONS of em, but it's the principle that counts: if Clinton did it then it's proper, even though, back when Clinton did it, the GOP said it was a crime.)

More from CREW (regarding the internal White House email system, not the outside accounts) :

The Bush administration discontinued the [Automated Records Management System], implemented by the Clinton administration in 1994 to fulfill its record keeping requirements.

In other words, they simply switched off the archiving of the email servers. Period.

Of course, an email message or an entire email sub-folder could be archived, as wanted, by copying it to a file server, but emails on a file server can easily be modified -- the emails aren't really "archived" (that is, preserved) in the usual sense.

Yet more, from CREW's website :

According to CREW's sources, in October 2005, the Office of Administration ("OA") . . . undertook a detailed analysis of the issue, which revealed that between March 2003 and October 2005, there were hundreds of days in which emails were missing for one or more of the EOP [Executive Office of the President] components subject to the PRA [Presidential Records Act]. The OA estimated that roughly over five million email messages were missing. Although the White House Counsel (then Harriet Miers) was provided a detailed briefing of this analysis and a plan of acction to recover the missing email was developed, the plan has never been executed. . . .

http://archives.gov/about/laws/presidential-records.html

§ 2202. Ownership of Presidential records
The United States shall reserve and retain complete ownership, possession, and control of Presidential records; and such records shall be administered in accordance with the provisions of this chapter.

§ 2203. Management and custody of Presidential records
(a) Through the implementation of records management controls and other necessary actions, the President shall take all such steps as may be necessary to assure that the activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of his constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties are adequately documented and that such records are maintained as Presidential records pursuant to the requirements of this section and other provisions of law.

There are no penalties listed within chapter 22.
What penalties can be imposed, then, other than impeachment?

http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/04/24/email.subpoena

Independent counsel subpoenas records in White House e-mail probe
April 24, 2000
WASHINGTON (CNN) - Independent Counsel Robert Ray has subpoenaed records from the National Archives in an attempt to determine whether the White House deliberately withheld electronic mail messages in an attempt to stymie investigations pertaining to the Monica Lewinsky affair and other Clinton Administration controversies, a government official told CNN on Monday.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the subpoena was issued a week ago. Ray, the successor to Independent Counsel Ken Starr . . .

. . . Technical problem led to controversy

At issue is a technical problem that may have occurred as early as 1994 in the White House e-mail archiving system -- an automated record management system known as "ARMS" -- that resulted in the improper scanning, logging and archiving of incoming, external e-mails to nearly 500 White House personnel, many of them high-ranking.

The White House has said that the technical problem may have kept some e-mail files -- which some estimate to number in the hundreds of thousands -- from being searched or handed over in response to a series of subpoenas issued by a variety of investigators.
- - CNN

The difference between then and now is that the Clinton White House had glitches with "ARMS" but the Bush White House simply switched "ARMS" off. They completely disabled it. That's not a glitch.

is gone, but the Anti-Imperialist League carries on.

The pinkish white clouds of cherry blossoms in Branch Brook Park this weekend won't be fragrant, but they'll be ideal for a constitutional walk.

In memory of good Uncle Alex, I must make a note to remember to say to my dog and my family, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

Clutching that silver dollar. Our local poet is our local prophet.

A morning without be-bop would be like a night without moonlight and rain.

Many Canadians think Diefenbaker coined that insult, but he didn't.

In "Inherit The Wind" (1955), Hornbeck (the Mencken character) says of Brady (the Bryan character), "He's the only man I know who can strut sitting down."

The phrase was popularized in 1948, when it was one of many insults thrown at Dewey, but the insult has been kicking around for at least the past 90 years, probably far longer.