Bush e-mails may stay secret a bit longer
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WASHINGTON - The required transfer in four weeks of all the Bush White House's electronic mail messages and documents to the National Archives has been imperiled by a combination of technical glitches, lawsuits, and lagging computer forensic work, according to government officials, historians, and lawyers.
Federal law requires outgoing White House officials to provide the Archives with copies of their records, a cache estimated at more than 300 million messages and 25,000 boxes of documents depicting some of the most sensitive policymaking of the past eight years.
But archivists are uncertain whether the transfer will include all the electronic messages sent and received by the officials because the administration began trying only in recent months to recover from White House backup tapes hundreds of thousands of e-mails that were reported missing from readily accessible files in 2005.
Eventual access to the documentary record of the Bush presidency has been eagerly anticipated by historians and journalists because the president and his aides generally have sought to shield many details of their deliberations and interactions with outside groups from public disclosure.
