WASHINGTON — The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the executive office of the president and the office of the vice president, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed Thursday by a congressional Democrat.
The 2005 study — whose credibility the White House attacked this week — identified 473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices, said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif.
Waxman said he decided to release the summary after White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Thursday that there was “no evidence” any White House e-mails from those years were missing. Fratto’s assertion “seems to be an unsubstantiated statement that has no relation to the facts they have shared with us,” Waxman said.
The competing claims were the latest salvos in an escalating dispute over whether the Bush administration has complied with statutory requirements to preserve official White House records.
Waxman said he is seeking testimony on the issue at a hearing next month by White House counsel Fred Fielding, National Archivist Allen Weinstein and Alan Swendiman, the politically appointed director of the Office of Administration, which produced the 2005 study at issue.
Another official in that office on Tuesday challenged the study’s credibility in a court affidavit, contending that current White House employees have been unable to confirm the veracity of the analysis or to re-create its findings. Waxman’s disclosure provides the first details about the study’s findings.
The White House is required by law to preserve e-mails considered presidential or federal records.
