George W. Bush's White House "lost" 22 million emails

Best to leave it alone, after all what happened to the WMD that got us into Iraq, the reality is that all administrations have sins to hide.

Sir, Thank you for your thoughtful response. Looking at the article I posted, I don't see that you responded to the points raised. Quoting:

"...In 2003, a whistle blower told the National Security Archive that the George W. Bush White House was no longer saving its emails [using the system set up by the Clinton administration]. The Archive and another watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (which had represented outed CIA agent Valerie Plame in her case against the Bush administration), refiled their original lawsuit.

"The plaintiffs soon discovered that Bush aides had simply shut down the Clinton automatic email archive, and they identified the start date of the lost emails as January 1, 2003. The White House claimed it had switched to a new server and in the process was unable to maintain an archive—a claim that many found dubious.

The Senate Judiciary Committee reported: “[T]his subversion of the justice system has included lying, misleading, stonewalling and ignoring the Congress in our attempts to find out precisely what happened. The reasons given for these firings [firing a number of U.S. attorneys] were contrived as part of a cover-up, and the stonewalling by the White House is part and parcel of that same effort.”

Also, "In a bipartisan vote in 2008, the committee found White House aides Karl Rove and Joshua Bolten in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with subpoenas in the investigation of the fired U.S. attorneys."

Sir, it seems to me that you are minimizing the efforts of the Bush Administration to evade public and legislative efforts to investigate serious issues: the run-up to the Iraq war, the firing of U.S. attorneys, and the Valery Plame situation for which Scooter Libby was convicted. As you know, President Obama and the Democratic Congress were focused on saving the economy and putting America back to work in 2008, so they went forward without investigating many questionable Bush administration actions. There is a good deal more that could be said about these issues, surely.

Pay attention to the way the article bounces back and forth between White House Emails and the system the Clinton Admin set up and RNC Servers. They are two different systems which serve a completely different purpose. Also if you knew anything about our capabilities on and prior to 2003, you'd know that archiving email was not only cost prohibited (due to the amount of space they required and our lack of the data centers), but considered impossible in meeting even future federal standards. Much has change since about 2007 as data center have become more affordable and have been prioritized. Much of this was identified when law enforcement could not find emails detailing some possibly illegal collusion in the new Air Force Tanker acquisition from one of two contracting companies. It was believed at the time, there may have been some deals going on by politician to get the contracts in their districts.

The article is full of a lot of "possible" and "supposedly", but in the end even states:

"Eventually, the Bush White House admitted it had lost 22 million emails, not 5 million. Then, in December 2009—well into Barack Obama’s administration—the White House said it found 22 million emails, dated between 2003 and 2005, that it claimed had been mislabeled. That cache was given to the National Archives, and it and other plaintiffs agreed, on December 14, 2009, to settle their lawsuit. But the emails have not yet been made available to the public."

So it appears that they found the email making all this moot. Nothing nifarious going on and no revelations have come out from an all too willing Obama Admin to point fingers at President Bush for his own problems.

As I mentioned, the article jumps between the two different IT infrastructures. The emails on the RNC servers, which is required by law, are for political party business. To date no one has found anything linking the Bush admin "scandals" to the email on these servers. This suggests one of two things, they were careful enough to destroy the drives to avoid discovery (which there is no evidence of) or the accusations were baseless and false in the first place. Note, that at the time there was an enormous effort by the DNC to paint the Iraq war in as bad a light as possible, to hurt the Bush administration. In the end, the email on the RNC servers are not subject to the PRA mentioned in the article UNLESS actual government business was conducted on them (which again has not been proven or discovered).

Now fast forward to Clinton. She built a personal server (not a party one), she conducted not some but ALL her official business on it, she used the server to transmit classified information (and let's not kid ourselves by believing the claim she didn't know it was classified), and she had these system purposefully wiped using advanced tools after the subpoena was issued. Many of those email were then recovered and proved Clinton did in fact lie in her claims the data was all personal and that there was no classified information. That claim later changed to "I thought it was authorized" and I didn't know the information was classified since it wasn't marked. Are you really going to try to equate the two between Clinton and Bush? If you continue to do so, you still have one question you still haven't answered, assuming the two discussions are the same; Was it illegal? Bitch all you want about the Bush Admin but the Plaintiffs have settled and the case was closed for Bush. If his admin did do something nefarious (which I do not believe they did), they got away with it. Implying that Clinton should as well is asinine.