Millions of White House E-mails Lost?
A spokeswoman announced today that perhaps 5 million White House e-mails may have been lost during a computer conversion years ago. Reuters reports that spokeswoman Dana Perino “said a White House review showed up to 5 million e-mails to and from as many as 1,700 executive branch employees might have been lost when the administration converted from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook in 2002 and 2003.”
Meanwhile, Karl Rove’s lawyer told the AP that any deletion of e-mail by Rove from the server of the private Republican National Committee computer he used for nongovernmental purposes was inadvertent.
Attorney Robert Luskin said Rove didn’t realize that—under a former system changed in 2005—deleting e-mails from his RNC inbox also deleted them from the RNC’s server. A retired FBI computer crimes specialist described the dual-deletion system as “highly unusual,” and said it makes recovering deleted e-mails “immeasurably harder.”
