White House settles missing e-mail suits.

• Position: E-MAIL - Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington v. National Security Archive

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Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the National Security Archive (NSA) settled their lawsuits criticizing the George W. Bush White House and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) for failing to act after learning that millions of e-mails had gone missing from White House servers during a two-and-a-half-year period. CREW is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting ethics and accountability in government; the NSA is an independent research institute and library located at The George Washington University.

According to CREWs lawsuit, the White House had discovered the problem in the fall of 2005 but failed to recover or restore the missing e-mails. In addition, the White House knowingly continued to use a broken system for preserving e-records.

ComputerWorld reported that the problems began after the White House moved from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange. At the same time, Bush's IT staff also stopped using the electronic management and archiving system called Automated Records Management Systems, which was put in place in 1994. Development began on a new archiving system, but there were problems and it was never implemented, according to ComputerWorld. As a result, the White House was left with manual processes to archive e-mails, which led to mislabeled and unorganized files.

Under the terms of the recent settlement, ComputerWorld reports that the Executive Office of the President (EOP) will restore a total of 94 days of missing e-mails, which it will send to NARA for preservation and eventual access under the Presidential Records Act or the Federal Records Act. The dates for restoration were chosen based on e-mail volume and external events, as it was too expensive to restore all the missing e-mails. According to ComputerWorld, nearly 22 million Bush e-mails have been recovered to date.

In addition, the EOP will continue to provide CREW and the NSA with records documenting the missing e-mail problem, the response of the Bush White House, and the options for preserving e-records the Bush White House considered but ultimately rejected. To date, the Obama White House has produced thousands of pages of...