Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Editorial: Preserving the presidency
The routine destruction of e-mail by the Bush White House will make an accurate history more difficult to compile. That seems to be the point.
From the RoundTable blog
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The White House didn't deliberately destroy e-mails it was supposed to keep, insisted spokesman Tony Fratto. The e-mails were inadvertently destroyed when the tapes storing them were overwritten.
The White House, not known for its environmental consciousness, was simply recycling the backup tapes, he said.
Never mind at least two federal statutes that require the preservation of presidential communications, including e-mails.
The Bush White House, after all, has never considered itself bound by the law.
Presidential historians are aghast about information that may have been lost.
"There certainly could have been hugely important materials there ... and of course they're not owned by President Bush or anybody in the administration, they're owned by the public," presidential historian and author Robert Dallek told The Washington Post.
It's always been easy for the Bush administration to overlook that small point -- that, as occupants of the White House, members of the administration have obligations to the public and to posterity.
Instead, Bush officials have stressed their desire for privacy. That desire, we suspect, has to do with shielding themselves from congressional investigations and potential criminal prosecution.
A number of scandals could have been illuminated by e-mails that were routinely destroyed, including the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent and the destruction of videotapes of CIA interrogations.
Ann Weisman, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which filed suit to compel the disclosure of White House e-mails, said the technological mismanagement was a sign of the president's priorities.
"These are not the steps of a White House committed to preserving records or meeting its obligations under the law," Weisman told The Post.
This is the same administration that conducted much of its business on Republican National Committee computers in an apparent attempt to circumvent disclosure requirements. Hundreds of thousands of such e-mails are supposedly unrecoverable.
Laws requiring preservation of White House communication are designed to ensure a more complete and accurate retelling of history.
That appears to be exactly what the Bush White House has been striving mightily to prevent.
These e-mails may never be able to be recovered. But Congress should conduct a full investigation to ensure that future administrations realize the law cannot be ignored without consequence.
