Washington Memo: File Not Found

By Ana Marie Cox

Correction Appended: April 20, 2007

The U.S. Attorneys scandal has raised many more questions than it has answered, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' prepared testimony was designed to make those questions even harder to answer. But experts agree on one aspect of the controversy. "Have [Administration officials] violated the Presidential Records Act?" asks Scott Nelson, a lawyer who represented the estate of Richard Nixon in a fight over his official papers. "There's no other conclusion I can reach." Says Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archives: "The only question is whether they did it intentionally or sloppily."

At the heart of the issue is the existence of two separate e-mail systems in the Bush White House: one for official business, the other for political e-mails on laptops owned by the Republican National Committee. The twin systems were supposed to keep politics and government separate, but hearings have revealed that crucial conversations about the U.S. Attorney firings were conducted on RNC laptops. The White House says that an unknown number of e-mails were deleted from the RNC servers.

The White House doesn't deny that staff members violated record-keeping procedures: instead of pleading innocence, they're pleading indolence. Says an official: "Was there some degree of laziness in overusing one account? Sure."

The Presidential Records Act, passed in 1978 as a reaction to Nixonian secrecy, is not a criminal statute, and the President himself oversees its compliance. In fact, the only possible punishment would be to bring criminal charges based on the theft or destruction of government property. That duty would fall, of course, to the Attorney General.

Correction: An earlier version of this story mistakenly reported that the White House had confirmed the deletion of 5 million emails from RNC servers. The White House has said only that monthly purges of the RNC email system from 2001 to 2004 resulted in the deletion of an unknown number of emails sent by White House staff via the RNC's system. Spokeswoman Dana Perino has said that emails may also have been deleted off the White House internal server, inadvertently, and that she could not "rule out" that as many as five million emails are missing from the default archive. The White House is investigating whether the missing emails may be available on back-up tapes.