Is Obama CCing Bush?

In the case over missing White House emails, plaintiffs claim Obama is taking a page from Bush.

Photo by flickr user <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/rowdyman/3229390020/">rowdyman</a> used under a <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org">Creative Commons</a> license.

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The Obama administration was supposed to bring a new era of accountability and transparency to Washington. But two nonprofits are complaining that the new President is taking the Bush administration line—at least for now—on a big issue: what to do (or not to do) about millions of missing White House emails.

The day after Obama was sworn in as President, the Justice Department filed a motion to dismiss a case brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the National Security Archive. The two watchdogs want to force the administration to prove that it has recovered all missing emails and has taken steps to prevent any more emails from being lost. Last Friday, the Obama administration missed a deadline to withdraw its motion. “If they didn’t want to litigate this, they would have withdrawn or asked to hold their motion,” says Anne Weismann, CREW’s chief counsel. “I would have taken that as a sign of good faith.”

When asked about the Obama administration’s apparent adoption of the Bush strategy at Monday’s White House press briefing, press secretary Robert Gibbs said, “This administration and this presidency seek a different amount of transparency than Washington has seen,” and quipped, “Dare I say email the Justice Department” about the seeming disconnect. But other administration officials were adamant that they could not comment about pending litigation.

It could be that the administration is working behind the scenes to settle the case, as the Clinton administration did when the NSA sued it in the early 1990s. The plaintiffs would certainly be open to the prospect: Weismann told Mother Jones that her organization “would be very open to an interest on their part to settle this lawsuit.” But so far, Weismann says, she hasn’t noticed “a difference” from the Bush administration’s legal strategy. “When we approached them about the possibility of finding a non-litigation way to resolve this, the response so far has been opposition,” she said.

But the Obama team’s moves in this case so far echo Bush administration’s strategy. In its motion to dismiss, the White House claims that missing emails are already being recovered and the suit is no longer necessary—exactly the same claim the Bush White House made throughout the second half of 2008. But the plaintiffs say that the efforts the White House has taken are still insufficient. “The motion that they filed suggests some activity but it definitely doesn’t suggest sufficient activity to save the emails,” says Meredith Fuchs, the general counsel for the National Security Archive.

The National Security Archive has sued every president since Reagan over email archiving. In its latest filing (PDF), the National Security Archive calls the motion to dismiss “no more than the latest in a long series of stonewalling tactics, which a less charitable litigant might characterize as a cover-up.” The plaintiffs claim that the issue at the heart of the lawsuit is the very transparency Gibbs said Obama wants to bring to Washington. After all, the plaintiffs have struggled for months to find out exactly what the White House has done to recover missing emails (perhaps millions) and prevent further losses. The little information that has emerged in court filings has not given the National Security Archive or CREW much comfort. “We have no assurance that the Obama administration is now using an appropriate method to archive emails,” Weismann says. “Do they intend, in the near future, to put in place a new record-keeping system? I would hope so, but I don’t know that for a fact. They haven’t told us anything.”

Fuchs says it’s hard for the plaintiffs to determine how close the White House is to having an appropriate, legally compliant archiving system without more disclosure: “It’s conceivable that what they’ve done is 95 percent of the way there. It’s conceivable it’s 50 percent of the way there. It’s conceivable it’s almost nothing. But we have so little information about what they’ve done, it’s very difficult for us to assess whether emails are safe at this point.” The bottom line, she says, is that, “from what we’ve read [in White House legal filings], we believe emails are still at risk and still have not been restored.”

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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