Report details loss of millions of Bush administration e-mails

Top aides to President George W. Bush seemed unconcerned despite multiple warnings as early as 2002 that the White House risked losing millions of e-mails that federal law required them to preserve.

Problems first arose when an e-mail record-keeping system established during Bill Clinton's presidency failed to archive messages sent by the Bush White House as it started converting e-mail accounts from Lotus Notes to the Microsoft Exchange program. The White House's Administration Office warned top Bush officials about the glitch and potential loss of e-mails but were ordered to continue with the conversion. "It wasn't like it was a one-time event and they went out and fixed it," said CREW senior counsel Adam Rappaport. The Administration Office later proposed a plan to fully restore the missing e-mails in 2005, but White House counsel Harriet E. Miers rejected the plan. In the end, the Bush White House spent at least $10 million to develop new electronic record management systems that restored just 48 days' worth of e-mail. Missing e-mails included messages from the months preceding the start of the Iraq war and messages sent by Vice President Richard B. Cheney's office that were later sought by the Justice Department as part of its investigation into the disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson's identity as a covert CIA spy.