The White House blames human error; opponents see obstruction. So now Congress is investigating, the Justice Department has launched a criminal probe and the Whitewater independent counsel’s office (yes, it still exists) is looking into it. Haven’t we been here before?
If this latest brouhaha involved anything other than computers and e-mail technology–whose intricacies have flummoxed the best of us–and anyone other than Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform, and Judicial Watch, who together have made virtual careers out of, respectively, investigating and suing the Clinton White House, it would be easier to view as a serious matter.
On the other hand, it may indeed be a serious matter. We just don’t know yet. This isn’t the first time files subject to investigation have been mysteriously lost and found at the Clinton White House. And because President Clinton and those around him have displayed a marked proclivity to dissemble, mislead and tortuously parse the language in their defense, the White House has left itself vulnerable to the suspicion of obstruction.
Here’s the deal in English as plain as we can muster: Thousands of e-mails sent to White House officials from outside the White House between September 1996 and November 1998 weren’t being automatically vetted to see if they contained information that had been subpoenaed in various inquiries ranging from Monica Lewinsky to campaign fund-raising abuses.
They were instead going into an e-mail limbo. That’s because a computer server was mislabeled upper-case “MAIL2” rather than lower-case “Mail2.”
When White House officials discovered this glitch in June 1998, they claim they thought they had fixed it without compromising their ability to respond to subpoenas. Only recently, testified White House Counsel Beth Nolan, did the White House come to realize that, in fact, many e-mails that were subject to subpoena were never turned over to investigators.
A separate, potentially much bigger computer glitch involves e-mails sent to and from Vice President Al Gore and his staff from 1994 forward. The fact that those e-mails were never vetted for subpoenas just came to light this month, Nolan testified.
Those missing e-mails have already become fodder for the presidential campaign. Said presumptive GOP nominee George W. Bush, “I look forward to seeing where these e-mails are and what was in these e-mails.”
He certainly isn’t the only one.
