Tired of ads? Subscribers enjoy a distraction-free reading experience.
Click here to subscribe today or Login.

LET’S SAY YOU’RE at work and need to send a work-related e-mail. Never mind the subject. And let’s say you work in an office whose every e-mail, incoming or outgoing, is saved in an official archive that will one day be pored over by strangers. Ugh.
Now let’s say you don’t have to use the e-mail system that automatically copies everything into that permanent archive. There’s an alternative system available to you, though you’re not supposed to use it for business. The alternative system deletes all e-mails after 30 days. Even better, it will let you delete them yourself, whenever you want.
Talk about an easy choice. Easy, that is, if you don’t mind breaking the rules — or, if you happen to work in the White House, the law.
That law is the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which requires that the White House keep materials needed to document “the activities, deliberations, decisions and policies that reflect the performance of his constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties” — in other words, just about everything.
The extent to which White House officials have used that alternative system is coming to light through the efforts of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, headed by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. The panel, which has just released an interim report on its investigation, has found that at least 88 officials — more than the “handful” first admitted by the White House, more even than the 50 later owned to — had e-mail accounts with the Republican National Committee.
Press secretary Tony Snow explained that the purpose of those RNC e-mail accounts was to comply with a different law: the Hatch Act, which prohibits the use of government resources for political endeavors. (Remember Vice President Al Gore and his use of White House phones, and the immortal phrase, “no controlling legal authority”?) If it turns out that members of the White House staff broke the law, that will be an interesting defense: The Hatch Act made us do it.
Whether the Presidential Records Act was indeed broken may depend on the content of the messages sent out over the RNC system. Finding out that content, in turn, may depend on the thoroughness with which they were destroyed. The committee report says that “potentially hundreds of thousands” may be lost; of those that remain, some clearly relate to official business, and thus should have been sent through the White House system or forwarded to it for preservation. Waxman’s committee is trying to find copies of missing e-mails in the files of other government agencies.
Some of those e-mails may be mundane, but much of what government has been up to was not: the Iraq war, for starters. The more information future historians have about that misadventure, the better.

Remember Vice President Al Gore and his use of White House phones, and the
immortal phrase, “no
controlling legal authority”?