House E-Mail Inquiry Finds Perjury, Cover-Up

WASHINGTON —  The staff of a House committee is charging that the White House, in failing to produce e-mails over a two-year period for a range of congressional investigations, is guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice.

A report prepared by James C. Wilson, chief counsel of the House Government Reform Committee, concludes that if a deliberate cover-up can be shown, “then the e-mail matter can fairly be called the most significant obstruction of congressional investigations in U.S. history.”

The politically charged report, an advance copy of which was obtained by The Times, is expected to be approved later this week by the Republican-led committee headed by Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.).

But Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), the ranking Democrat on the panel, said that the report, which calls for an outside counsel to consider criminal offenses, presents “bizarre and reckless charges” that distort evidence gathered at a series of committee hearings.

“I am bewildered by the factual inaccuracies and omissions,” Waxman said. “But this committee has a long history of making unsubstantiated allegations.”

The House committee began its investigation in May after White House officials acknowledged that as many as 240,000 e-mail messages, including some from Vice President Al Gore’s office, had not been properly archived. As a result, congressional subpoenas asking for all documents on such issues as campaign finance, Whitewater and the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal were not fully met.

Although the problem was known to some White House aides as early as 1996, their failure to inform Congress until June 1998--and subsequent delays in reporting all the facts--hampered the committee’s investigation, the report says.

The White House staff was “more interested in covering up the problem than in full disclosure,” it says.

The report notes testimony by former White House counsel Charles F.C. Ruff that he was first briefed about the missing e-mails in June 1998 and was aware that it could affect the administration’s compliance with outstanding subpoenas from Congress and the Whitewater independent counsel’s office, which then was investigating the Lewinsky affair.

Ruff said that when he ordered an effort to recapture a limited number of the lost e-mails, he found that they duplicated documents previously submitted from the computers of individual White House employees. All the lost e-mails involved incoming messages from outside the White House to about 400 White House employees.

The House report, however, brands as “not credible” the explanation that White House officials “failed to understand the legal ramifications of the e-mail problem from the very beginning.”

In fact, says the report, “the failure to notify Congress about the e-mail problem indicates that the White House wanted to cover up the e-mail problem, not solve it.”

The report concludes that White House efforts to recapture lost e-mail messages have been so inadequate and time-consuming that “a special master should be appointed to supervise the review and production.” A special master would be separate from the outside prosecutor recommended by the panel.

The report also cites testimony in May by Betty Lambuth, the manager of an independent contracting firm whose team discovered the e-mail problem, that she and her colleagues were threatened with jail by White House officials if they disclosed that thousands of e-mails were missing.

The office of Whitewater independent counsel Robert W. Ray has been looking into Lambuth’s charges, with assistance from a federal grand jury, but Waxman noted that the committee itself has found little corroboration for them. Ray’s office, however, has insufficient jurisdiction to investigate those allegations, and a special counsel should be appointed, according to the committee report.

White House spokesman Elliot Diringer said there is “nothing new in any of these allegations, which Chairman Burton has chosen to recycle on the eve of the presidential debates.”