Missing E-Mails Allow Congress to Issue Its Own Stamp of Disapproval

WASHINGTON —  It’s the latest episode of the longest-running show in the nation’s capital.

In a congressional hearing room, angry Republicans led by Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana are deploring and denouncing presidential aides for their mishandling of subpoenaed White House e-mail messages lost for two years through a computer glitch.

And the aides, unfazed, are denying, defending and gamely explaining away why they kept the problem secret for so long from congressional panels and outside prosecutors who had subpoenaed electronic and paper documents dealing with investigations like the Monica S. Lewinsky case and Democratic campaign finance abuses.

Does the matter in dispute involve a criminal offense or just politics? It’s hard to tell, but the case has highlighted the extraordinary level of ill will between the Republican congressional leadership and the White House.

The House hearings have degenerated into exaggerated political rhetoric by Burton, who chairs the House Government Reform Committee, and some of his colleagues. Burton has accused presidential aides of “a shameful record” of deliberate cover-up, obfuscation and perjury.

But two months of sporadic hearings by Congress have failed to produce evidence that the e-mail breakdown was intentional or that the White House deliberately withheld key information from outside investigators.

No evidence has been adduced so far that the missing e-mails, estimated at 246,000 messages, contained crucial evidence that investigators for Congress or independent counsels did not obtain from other sources. The White House has said that it has set about recapturing all of the messages, an effort that will cost taxpayers $3 million and will take until September.

Furthermore, charges by Betty Lambuth, the manager of an outside contracting firm whose team discovered the e-mail problem, that she and her colleagues were threatened with jail by White House officials have been disputed by others.

In spite of the overblown rhetoric, a deepening suspicion has set in that the already shaky credibility of the White House may be taking another well-deserved pummeling for the administration’s inaction, misleading statements or mismanagement.

New White House internal memos disclosed by the committee show that a minor cover-up of sorts was at least discussed last year when the e-mail glitch was still confidential.

Dated Feb. 5, 1999, one memo laid out the history of the e-mail breakdown as part of a set of talking points that could be used in case the subject came up at congressional appropriation hearings on last year’s budget request.

The author of the memo, Karl H. Heissner of the White House Office of Administration, wrote that the White House had asked for a proposal “to recover the missing records” from backup tapes in late 1998 and that Northrop Grumman had placed the cost of starting recovery at $602,000.

But, Heissner wrote, “we may not want to call attention to the issue” of the messages missing from 1996 to 1998 because information requests from Congress and other investigators had greatly diminished.

“Let sleeping dogs lie,” he concluded in the memo. White House officials, in fact, did not divulge the existence of the glitch to Congress and waited months before telling independent prosecutors.

Vehemently denying any cover-up, Charles F.C. Ruff, who was White House counsel at the time, testified this week that when he was first briefed about the e-mail problem in June 1998, he was aware that it could affect the administration’s compliance with outstanding subpoenas.

But Ruff said he immediately ordered an effort to recapture a limited number of messages on the Lewinsky case to determine if any new material would turn up. However, this “test search” of the archiving system produced only e-mail messages that duplicated those already furnished to then-independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr from the individual computers of White House employees like presidential secretary Betty Currie.

Ruff said that this caused him to conclude, mistakenly, that the e-mail breakdown was not serious enough so that congressional committees like Burton’s should be alerted. He had no idea, he said, that the e-mail storage problem was more widespread, affecting other investigations, such as campaign fund-raising.

But the former White House lawyer elicited expressions of incredulity from Burton and other GOP members by saying that he could not recall who was in charge of the search to recapture missing messages, which would allow the committee to question that person directly.

The computer glitch occurred in the most troubled of times--five months after Starr had begun investigating President Clinton’s relationship to ex-White House intern Lewinsky in early 1998.

Technicians working under contract for the White House discovered that incoming e-mail messages since August 1996 had not been recorded on the White House automated records management system. That meant thousands of electronic documents over a two-year period may not have been furnished in response to subpoenas from Starr.

Besides the Lewinsky case, congressional committees had issued massive subpoenas for other documents--whether electronic or paper--relating to Democratic campaign finance abuses during the 1996 presidential election. But because of the two-year breakdown in the master computer system, it was possible that highly relevant incoming e-mail messages from outside organizations, such as the Democratic National Committee, had never been seen by Senate and House investigators.

Lambuth, a manager for outside contractor Northrop Grumman, whose team discovered the problem, testified that the situation at the White House was so tense that she and her colleagues “were threatened . . . with loss of our jobs, arrest and jail if we told anyone,” including their spouses.

“I quickly came to the conclusion that the Clinton White House had no intention of fixing the problem,” Lambuth told a House panel seven weeks ago when hearings opened into the e-mail breakdown.

Her testimony, which some co-workers and White House officials characterized as inaccurate or overly dramatic, is part of two other investigations of the e-mail problem by Starr’s successor, Whitewater independent counsel Robert W. Ray, and the Justice Department.

However, were it not for Judicial Watch, the conservative legal foundation that has gone to court over numerous missteps by the administration, the matter might still be secret. The missing e-mails first surfaced in a Judicial Watch civil suit earlier this year.

Beth Nolan, the current White House counsel, has assured investigators that missing copies of the e-mails are still intact on backup systems and ultimately will be produced. A separate computer glitch that inadvertently prevented Vice President Al Gore’s office from furnishing additional e-mails on campaign fund-raising matters also is being remedied, she said.