Does anyone at all believe that the White House isn’t engaged in a massive erasing binge right now?
The required transfer in four weeks of all of the Bush White House‘s electronic mail messages and documents to the National Archives has been imperiled by a combination of technical glitches, lawsuits and lagging computer forensic work, according to government officials, historians and lawyers.
It’s a tradition, you know:
Thomas S. Blanton, the National Security Archive director, said controversy surrounding the last-minute handling of e-mails by retiring presidents — including intervention by the courts — is hardly exceptional.
Blanton wrote in a 1995 book that Ronald Reagan tried to order the erasure of all electronic backup tapes during his final week in office; the current president’s father struck a secret deal with the U.S. archivist shortly before midnight on his final day in office to seal White House e-mails and take them with him to Texas; and Clinton asserted in 1994 that the National Security Council was not an agency of the government so he could keep its e-mails beyond public reach.
Blanton said last week that “the situation is exponentially worse” under the current administration because the volume of electronic records at stake from Bush’s tenure is higher than in previous administrations. If some of the records are manipulated, even for a short while, he said, “the problem and the cost to the taxpayers is going to be exponentially worse, [as well as] the delay and the lag time before journalists and historians are going to be able to see this.”
jen
For administrations since Nixon, records are a problem and becoming more so. Kissinger, for example, took nearly all his papers as “personal papers” from his time at NSC and Dept. State. They are deposited at the Library of Congress, but closed until his death (plus a few years, if I remember right.) The Nixon Library, though, is working hard to get the complete presdential records opened as quickly as possible – a bunch of stuff will be transfered from NARA to Yorba Linda. The Reagan library, heh, nothing to see here, move along. There are a few files available, but nothing especially substantive. The speech files are open – and are interesting for the amount of personal involvement Reagan had in the writing process. The last few administrations, though, yoix. It’s not a pretty sight, both in terms of what has been with-held and the records that are believed to have been destroyed.
And that’s not mentioning the efforts under the current administration to go back and re-classify old records dating back to the Truman era, records that in some cases have been open for decades.
The British system is hardly perfect, but they do tend to stick to their 30 year rule and to the notion that government records are public, not the personal property of the officials who created them.
It’s hard enough to understand government decision-making with nearly complete records. When they’re incomplete or consciously manipulated, it’s very difficult indeed.
Amit
MB, its always a conspiracy with you! ;-)
funny thing about this story is that I was one of the consultants brought in at the White House during the end of the Clinton administration when all the GOP were accusing Clinton of the same thing. The truth is what it usually seems to be with the govt. Incompetence. The Clintons basically didn’t have basic understanding of how to archive emails properly and really weren’t hiding anything but rather didn’t know how to expose it.
I know I know. Bush is no Clinton and he’s evil and all that so its different.
MB
Oh, I don’t discount incompetence at all. For example, I don’t believe that the Dept. of the Interior is actually trying to steal billions from tribes – it’s just that they’re so obscenely incompetent that that’s the end result.
Neither, however, do I discount this Admin’s publicly demonstrated commitment to shielding itself from any honest public examination. Add that together with the general human tendency to not want to leave evidence of your crimes laying about, and, well, I suspect there’s a whole lot of housecleaning going on right now.
(I have no idea why we leave the WH communications systems in the hands of the WH. It should be run by Archivist from the get go.)
~
Jen, that reclassifying previously unclassified material is dark comedy, indeed.