One day after he was sworn in as President of the United States and in the same week signing executive orders ushering in a new era of government transparency, Barack Obama's Justice Department quietly filed a motion in federal court to dismiss a long-running lawsuit that sought to force the Bush administration to recover as many as 15 million missing White House e-mails.
In a legal briefs filed Jan. 21, the Justice Department admitted that a secretive restoration process implemented during George W. Bush's last months in office was still incomplete, and that a bulk of the e-mails sent between 2003 and 2005 were deleted from servers in the Executive Office of the President and unrecoverable. The missing e-mails cover a time-frame that included the lead up to the Iraq war, a lawsuit involving the identities of individuals and corporations who advised Dick Cheney on energy policy and the leak by White House officials of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity.
But despite it all, the newly minted Obama administration said in court papers that the issue revolving around the missing e-mails is "moot" because some steps, however incomplete, have been taken by the Bush White House to preserve and restore missing e-mails, even though the work has been conducted under the cover of secrecy by an unknown outside contractor hired by Bush administration officials.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Obama's DOJ Quietly Sought Dismissal of Missing E-Mails Lawsuit from TPR: The Public Record
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