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GCN Home > April 3, 2000 issue

White House: Retrieving ‘lost’ e-mail will cost up to $3 million

By Shruti Daté
GCN Staff

During the past four years, small but errant code changes made by the White House technical staff prevented an Executive Office system from properly saving the incoming e-mail messages of hundreds of users.

The White House likely will have to spend 170 days and $1.8 million to $3 million to reconstruct thousands of e-mail messages that are available only as raw data on server backup tapes, White House counsel Beth Nolan said last month in a letter to the House Government Reform Committee.

Committee chairman Dan Burton has suggested that the White House engaged in a cover-up of the error, and he is demanding that it deliver the missing e-mail messages.

In a standoff between the White House and Capitol Hill that has become increasingly tense, the Indiana Republican last week called for appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the administration’s response to the code errors.

“The big deal is not that a computer technician made a mistake. Mistakes happen,” Burton said at a March 23 hearing on the missing White House e-mail. “The big deal is how the White House reacted to it.”

The records brouhaha arose during the course of the committee’s campaign finance investigation. White House officials revealed that they did not have immediate access to all electronic correspondence.

In an eight-page letter to Attorney General Janet Reno calling for appointment of a special prosecutor, Burton decried Reno’s supervision of the campaign fund-raising investigation. “Ms. Reno, you cannot use the campaign financing task force, supervised by yourself, to investigate yourself and the Justice Department lawyers who helped keep the e-mails from being produced to Congress, independent counsels and your own campaign financing task force,” Burton wrote.

On the case

The White House blames two computer code errors for the failure of its records management system to save some incoming e-mail messages. “Two separate configuration errors occurred, which prevented certain incoming e-mails sent to the Automated Records Management System-managed accounts from being recorded in ARMS for a period of time,” Nolan wrote in her March 17 letter to Burton.



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