Group Seeks Contempt Hearing on White House E-Mail Statements
An advocacy group claims the Bush administration apparently made false and misleading statements about e-mail backups in a lawsuit alleging violations of record-keeping laws.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the plaintiff in the suit, says there is a discrepancy between what the administration told a federal court and information contained in a government report, the Associated Press reports. ”This evidence demonstrates defendants’ blatant disregard for the truth and the processes of this court,” the group says in a motion filed yesterday with U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy of Washington, D.C.
The group is seeking an order to show cause (PDF posted by CREW) why the president’s executive office should not be held in contempt.
White House official Theresa Payton had told the court that substantially all of the e-mails from a two-year period ending in 2005 should be on backup tapes. But a White House document submitted at a congressional hearing said one or more White House offices failed to archive e-mail messages on 473 separate days.
“The stakes in this litigation are high for both the defendants and the American public,” the advocacy group writes in a memorandum (PDF posted by CREW) supporting its request for a contempt hearing. “Defendants risk exposure of the facts behind the complete and utter dereliction of their recordkeeping responsibilities, facts that raise serious and disturbing questions about why the White House has failed to take any action in the face of millions of e-mail records that have gone missing. The American public, for its part, risks losing a significant body of the historical records of this presidency, records that will shed light on critical and highly controversial decisions.”
