http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,11655,00.html Many Gore Office E-mails Will Never Be Recovered
Wednesday, April 18, 2001
WASHINGTON - It will be impossible to restore much of the White House e-mail
traffic in the office of former Vice President Gore, despite a year-long
effort in which technical experts recovered 3 million missing messages from
computer tapes, recently filed court papers reveal.
The latest twist in one of the long-running controversies of the Clinton
administration was disclosed in a computer contractor's three-page
declaration filed in a lawsuit in federal court.
Because of a computer glitch that wasn't publicly revealed until the final
year of Clinton's presidency, the White House never reviewed many of its
computer messages to see if they should be turned over in criminal probes
and congressional inquiries of campaign fund-raising, the Monica Lewinsky
scandal, Whitewater and other matters.
The April 6 declaration by a technician from Vistronix Corp. says that due
to unspecified problems the computer contractor could not extract e-mails
from 189 computer backup tapes.
Sixty-three of the "problem" tapes - fully a third of them - were from
Gore's office.
The 189 tapes represented only 5 percent of all the tapes used in
reconstructing e-mails in the past year.
Efforts to reach Gore's spokeswoman Wednesday night were not successful.
The Justice Department campaign fund-raising task force, which launched an
investigation of possible obstruction in connection with the missing e-mails
last year, declined to comment Wednesday night on the status of the probe.
The court papers also showed that the universe of messages that was never
properly archived and therefore was never searched to see if they were
relevant to various investigations is far more vast than the Clinton
administration ever suggested.
The reconstructed database "currently includes 3,075,513 unique
non-duplicative e-mails, out of more than 2.9 billion processed from the
relevant tape population,'' the declaration states. Computer contractors did
recover many of the messages from Gore's office and a batch of them was
turned over to investigators last year at the Justice Department when
contractors were only partly through the reconstruction.
The Gore campaign released those e-mails publicly, saying they contained
"nothing of significance," while the Bush campaign said the messages called
Gore's credibility into question in regard to campaign fund raising. Some of
the messages related to Gore's attendance at a fund-raising event at a
Buddhist temple in California. Gore said he didn't realize the event was a
fund-raiser.
The e-mails created by hundreds of staffers at the Clinton White House are
in the custody of the National Archives, and the White House Office of
Administration in the Bush administration is overseeing the effort to
reconstruct the material.
The contractor's declaration was filed in a case brought by Judicial Watch,
which sued the Clinton administration repeatedly on a variety of issues. The
e-mail issue arose in the group's class-action lawsuit over the Clinton
White House's gathering of FBI background files of appointees from the
Reagan and Bush administrations.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said the government so far has turned
over just one e-mail in the group's lawsuit.
--
To legislate and litigate tolerance, in my estimation, only forces employers
and landlords to do that with which they are not comfortable and their
discomfort is transferred to our cause because they have been forced to do
something against their will.
Opinion by Scott Evertz
