WASHINGTON — After promising last year to search its computers for tens of thousands of e-mails sent by White House officials, the Republican National Committee has informed a House committee that it no longer plans to retrieve the communications by restoring computer backup tapes, the panel’s chairman said Tuesday.
The move increases the likelihood that an untold number of the committee’s e-mails dealing with official White House business during the first term of the Bush administration — including many sent or received by former presidential adviser Karl Rove — will never be recovered, according to House Democrats and public-records advocates.
The RNC had previously told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that it was attempting to restore e-mails from 2001 to 2003, when it had a policy of purging all e-mails, including those to and from White House officials, after 30 days.
But Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., disclosed Tuesday that the RNC has now said it “has no intention of trying to restore the missing White House e-mails.”
“The result is a potentially enormous gap in the historical record,” Waxman said, including the time leading up to the start of the Iraq war.
RNC spokesman Danny Diaz said in a statement that the committee “is fully compliant with the spirit and letter of the law.” He declined any further comment.
The RNC dispute is part of a broader debate over whether the Bush administration has complied with statutory requirements to preserve White House records. Waxman’s committee is investigating allegations that vast stores of official e-mails from the first half of the Bush administration also are missing.
A former White House technology manager told Waxman’s committee that the Bush administration’s e-mail system “was primitive and the risk that data would be lost was high.”
Steven McDevitt said he supervised an internal study that found hundreds of days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices from January 2003 to August 2005. He also said security was so lax that e-mail could be modified by anyone on the computer network until the middle of 2005.
