Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/14/us/some-bush-white-house-tapes-lost-archivists-say.html
March 14, 1993
A report by the Federal archivists who collected thousands of White House computer tapes in the waning hours of the Bush Administration indicates that several sets of the tapes, ordered preserved by a Federal judge, have been lost.
A Feb. 16 memo from the National Archives panel that gathered the material said "many dates are missing" from the piles of computer tapes hastily collected in the final 18 hours of the Administration.
A lawyer involved in the case that led to the judge's order said it appeared that "several sets of tapes had been erased, perhaps inadvertently." The lawyer, Cheryl Walter, also said some hard disk drives that were removed from White House computers when the Bush Administration left office may have been damaged by sloppy handling in the transfer. She said the drives, which also contain data, were "thrown in a box with no padding" as the archivists hurried to gather the material before the Clinton Administration took over on Jan. 20.
All told, 4,000 to 5,000 backup tapes from the Bush and Reagan Administrations were collected; such tapes were made every night. The recent losses, reported Saturday in the Washington Post, might amount to a few days' worth, Ms. Walter said. The loss is in addition to about two weeks of Reagan Administration tapes that were found to be missing or erased in an inventory last fall.
In January, Judge Charles R. Richey of Federal District Court ordered the Bush Administration and the National Archivist to save the tapes, which contain records of computer files and electronic-mail messages. The order came in response to a long-running suit by Ms. Walter's group, the National Security Archive, a private organization that collects Government documents, and several public-interest groups seeking to preserve the tapes.
Computer messages provided important evidence in the Iran-contra trials of Oliver L. North and John M. Poindexter, a national security adviser in the Reagan Administration.
The White House tapes were collected in the final hours of the Bush Administration in accordance with an unusual agreement between the National Archivist at the time, Don W. Wilson, and President George Bush giving "exclusive legal control over all Presidential information" to Mr. Bush.
The memo from the archives panel describes in dry detail the frustrations its members faced in Mr. Bush's last hours in office as they hurriedly collected years' worth of classified White House communications even as President Clinton was making his way up Pennsylvania Avenue after his swearing-in. At several points the memo describes long waits for doors to be opened and difficulties in parking the archivists' truck.
Mr. Wilson and the agreement on the tapes came under criticism after the Archivist announced that he would head the Bush Presidential library in Houston. The plaintiffs in the case have also said that they would challenge the agreement in court.
Michael Tankersley, a lawyer for another plaintiff, the public-interest group Public Citizen, said the problems were a result of the "unnecessary" speed dictated by the agreement, which "made for the improper transfer of material." The only reason for the haste, he said, was the desire of Bush officials to keep Clinton employees from having access to the computer files.
Ms. Walter said the problems indicated the need for guidelines on handling computer records, a major goal of the lawsuit.
Court: Cheney can decide what records to save: A federal judge ruled Monday that Vice President Dick Cheney has broad discretion in determining what records created during his eight-year tenure must be preserved.
Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna28738473
The Associated Press
Jan. 19, 2009
A federal judge ruled Monday that Vice President Dick Cheney has broad discretion in determining what records created during his eight-year tenure must be preserved.
Absent any evidence that Cheney's office is failing to safeguard records, it is up to the vice president to determine how he deals with material, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled.
"Congress drastically limited the scope of outside inquiries related to the vice president's handling of his own records during his term in office," the judge said in a 63-page opinion.
The Presidential Records Act "provides only narrow areas of oversight," the ruling added.
At issue is whether Cheney had impermissibly limited the scope of the Presidential Records Act, a post-Watergate law aimed at protecting White House records.
Cheney has taken the legal position that his office is not part of the executive branch of government, triggering a lawsuit by several groups including three organizations of historians and archivists concerned that the record of Cheney's time in office might not be adequately safeguarded.
Last summer, Cheney chief of staff David Addington told Congress the vice president belongs to neither the executive nor legislative branch of government, but rather is attached by the Constitution to Congress. The vice president presides over the Senate.
The lawsuit alleges that the Bush administration's actions over the past eight years call into question whether the White House will turn over to the National Archives a complete record of the activities of Cheney and his staff.
The ruling means that there is little room for the courts or the U.S. archivist to ensure that records are being protected.
"This is a huge loophole in the Presidential Records Act and Congress needs to address it immediately," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group that was one of the plaintiffs in the case.
CREW tried but failed to get permission from the judge to question Addington about Cheney's record-keeping practices.
President Bill Clinton Lost Nuclear Codes While in Office, New Book Claims: Fmr. Chairman of Joint Chiefs says nuclear "biscuit" went missing for months. By John Donvan
Source: https://abcnews.go.com/WN/president-bill-clinton-lost-nuclear-codes-office-book/story?id=11930878
October 20, 2010
When you're President of the United States, you can lose a vote, you can lose popular support, and you can lose a round of golf. But you're never, ever supposed to lose the biscuit.
That's what they call the card the president is meant to keep close at hand, bearing the codes that he has to have in order to launch a nuclear attack. And for several months during the Clinton administration, a former top military officer says they lost the biscuit.
Watch "World News with Diane Sawyer" for more on this story tonight on ABC.
Gen. Hugh Shelton, who served under Clinton as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tells the story in his just-published memoir, "Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior."
"At one point during the Clinton administration," Shelton writes, "the codes were actually missing for months. [...] That's a big deal -- a gargantuan deal."
Similar Story Told By Air Force Man
Shelton claims the story has never been released before, but Ret. Air Force Lt. Col Robert Patterson told a very similar account in his own book, published seven years ago.
Patterson was one of the men who carried the football, and he says it was literally the morning after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke that he made a routine request of the president to present the card so that he could swap it out for an updated version.
"He thought he just placed them upstairs," Patterson recalled. "We called upstairs, we started a search around the White House for the codes, and he finally confessed that he in fact misplaced them. He couldn't recall when he had last seen them."
In Patterson's telling of the story, the President lost the biscuit in 1998, but according to Shelton, the card went missing in 2000.
President Sends the 'Biscuit' to the Cleaners?
If the facts seem murky, that's not unusual when national security matters are involved. Consider the old story that Jimmy Carter left his biscuit in a suit that got sent to the dry cleaners. Today, no one will confirm the story, but no one will deny it either.
22 Hillary Clinton Emails Dubbed Top Secret By Carrie Johnson and Jessica Taylor
Source: https://www.npr.org/2016/01/29/464811045/as-iowa-caucuses-near-clinton-email-probe-persists
January 29, 2016
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Controversy grew on Friday over emails from Hillary Clinton's private server she used while at the State Department, with the agency announcing several documents would be withheld because they had been deemed top secret.
"We can confirm that later today, as part of our monthly FOIA productions of former Secretary Clinton's emails, the State Department will be denying in full seven email chains, found in 22 documents representing 37 pages. The documents are being upgraded at the request of the intelligence community because they contain a category of top secret information," State Department spokesman John Kirby said. "These documents were not marked classified at the time they were sent."
Kirby reiterated that he would not comment on the content or subject of the blocked documents.
The new revelations come at a particularly politically damaging time — just days before the Iowa caucuses on Monday, where the former secretary of state is neck and neck with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Clinton's campaign responded that the new roadblock "appears to be overclassification run amok" and that it will "pursue all appropriate avenues to see that her emails are released in a manner consistent with her call last year."
"After a process that has been dominated by bureaucratic infighting that has too often played out in public view, the loudest and leakiest participants in this interagency dispute have now prevailed in blocking any release of these emails. This flies in the face of the fact that these emails were unmarked at the time they were sent, and have been called 'innocuous' by certain intelligence officials," Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said. "We understand that these emails were likely originated on the State Department's unclassified system before they were ever shared with Secretary Clinton, and they have remained on the department's unclassified system for years. And, in at least one case, the emails appear to involve information from a published news article."
Clinton told NPR's Ari Shapiro last week that was the case in at least one instance, following an initial report that some of the emails had been marked top secret.
"As the State Department has confirmed, I never sent or received any material marked classified, and that hasn't changed in all of these months," Clinton maintained. "This seems to me to be, you know, another effort to inject this into the campaign. It's another leak."
An additional 18 emails, including eight distinct email chains, between Clinton and President Obama will also be withheld under executive privilege. They are not classified, Kirby said, and will eventually be released under the Presidential Records Act.
The announcement of the top secret emails comes as the agency is already behind on its monthly production of emails. The State Department has already made public 43,000 pages of Hillary Clinton's emails, and 1,000 more pages are supposed to come out Friday evening. In a late-night court filing this week, authorities said about 7,000 more pages are not yet ready for release.
"State has moved diligently to process the documents and send them to the appropriate agencies for review, a process that was interrupted by the blizzard that struck Washington, D.C.," the court filing said.
That means at least one more Clinton email dump is coming, after primary voting is underway in several states.
And Clinton also fighting multiple investigations into her decision to use a private email server as secretary of state.
The FBI investigation into Clinton's email has been underway for months now. And while the Justice Department and FBI have been keeping a close hold on information, the probe appears to involve whether any government secrets were compromised and how that came to happen.
The inquiry involves not just Clinton, but some of her close aides who sent her messages. Clinton recently told reporters that she has not been interviewed by federal agents, but that is something that typically occurs near the end of an investigation.
Republicans quickly seized on the revelation of the new top secret emails, saying they "once again raise serious legal questions given the fact Hillary Clinton signed a legally binding agreement obligating her to protect classified material regardless of whether it was marked."
"With even more emails on her secret server found to contain 'Top Secret' information, Hillary Clinton has removed all doubt she cannot be trusted with the presidency," Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement. "Hillary Clinton's attempt to skirt government transparency laws by relying exclusively on an unsecure email server in her basement put our national security and diplomatic efforts at risk. And rather tell the American people the truth, Hillary Clinton, her campaign, and her friends in the Obama Administration have obfuscated and misled at every available opportunity. If this isn't disqualifying I don't know what is."
Earlier this week, Clinton told the Quad City Times that her use of a private email server had become a distraction.
"It was a mistake because who wants to put people through all of this?" Clinton said. "I don't want to go through it; I don't want to put a lot of my friends through it. So it was a mistake."
Clinton has said she never sent or received any messages marked classified.
That FBI investigation is far from the only scrutiny the Clinton emails are getting. Reporters and conservative public interest groups have filed federal lawsuits to get copies of those messages.
And Republicans are taking notice. Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey — who served in the George W. Bush administration — published an op-ed accusing Clinton of mishandling classified information, a violation of the law.
Presidential candidate and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio brought up the issue Thursday at the Fox News Channel debate.
"Hillary Clinton is disqualified from being the commander in chief of the United States," Rubio said. "In fact one of her first acts as president may well be to pardon herself. That's because Hillary Clinton stored classified information on her private server."
The email issue is on the agenda in Congress as well. Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, who leads the Judiciary Committee, has sent two binders full of letters to Clinton, the State Department and the Justice Department.
He wants to know what the FBI is doing, whether it is going to grant immunity from prosecution to the information technology aide who helped set up Clinton's private server, and whether federal agents are investigating dealings between the State Department and donors to the Clinton foundation.
Crisis at the National Archives By Thomas Lipscomb
Source: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/06/10/crisis_at_the_national_archives_137241.html
June 10, 2018
In the middle of directing the difficult task of transferring the historically important records of the Obama administration into the National Archives, the archivist in charge, David Ferriero, ran into a serious problem: A lot of key records are missing.
A first-rate librarian, Ferriero has been driving a much-needed digital overhaul and expansion of the National Archives over the nine years of his appointment. This will greatly improve the ability of digital search locally and remotely, as well as accessing the files themselves.
To support this effort, in 2014 President Obama signed the Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments. For the first time electronic government records were placed under the 1950 Federal Records Act. The new law also included updates clarifying "the responsibilities of federal government officials when using non-government email systems" and empowering "the National Archives to safeguard original and classified records from unauthorized removal.” Additionally, it gives the Archivist of the United States the final authority in determining just what is a government record.
And yet the accumulation of recent congressional testimony has made it clear that the Obama administration itself engaged in the wholesale destruction and “loss” of tens of thousands of government records covered under the act as well as the intentional evasion of the government records recording system by engaging in private email exchanges. So far, former President Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Attorney General Lynch and several EPA officials have been named as offenders. The IRS suffered record “losses” as well. Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy called it “an unauthorized private communications system for official business for the patent purpose of defeating federal record-keeping and disclosure laws.”
Clearly, America’s National Archives is facing the first major challenge to its historic role in preserving the records of the United States. What good is the National Archives administering a presidential library, like the planned Obama library in Chicago, if it is missing critical records of interest to scholars? And what’s to prevent evasion of the entire federal records system by subsequent administrations to suit current politics rather than serve scholars for centuries to come?
The National Archives in Washington has evolved from a few dusty shelves in 1934 to an independent agency with over 40 facilities nationwide. These include field archives, military records, Federal Records Centers, 13 presidential libraries, the Federal Register, and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.
Its electronic records system alone, which only began in 2008, has already compiled close to 1 billion unique files from over 100 federal agencies totaling well over 400 terrabytes. The archive describes itself as “the U.S. Government's collection of documents that records important events in American history. … the Government agency that preserves and maintains these materials and makes them available for research.”
Federal records have solved historical mysteries and provided key information ever since the archive’s founding. Adm. Hyman Rickover’s investigations there proved his suspicion that the U.S. battleship Maine had not been sunk by a Spanish mine, but rather an explosion caused by careless proximity of gunpowder storage to coal bunkers.
And in my own research, I found a detailed report of the debriefing of Nazi Deputy Reichsfuhrer Rudolf Hess by MI6 the day after he parachuted into Scotland -- a report that was not in the British Archives. It established that in May 1941, over seven months before the Wannsee Conference formalized the Nazis’ “Final Solution,” Hess had told the British: “We are exterminating the Jews.” It established as lies the Allies’ claims they only learned about the Holocaust later.
The archive sensibly only collects a fraction of the federal records for its permanent archive. That number varies between 2 percent and 5 percent of the total. That can be a good thing, according to historian Arthur Herman. “In studying a bureaucracy, too much evidence may be a greater danger than too little,” he said. “The amount of material often seems to be inversely proportionate to the value of its evidence.”
And Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph J. Ellis points out that it is not always the record itself that is key: “Sometimes it is the marginalia. There were 28,000 notations in the John Adams collection that were critical to my interpretation of the relationship between John and Abigail Adams.”
And marginalia may be the key to solving the puzzle of just what the late Sandy Berger, acting as former President Bill Clinton’s representative, was destroying during his 2005 trips into the National Archives, where he stuffed papers into his clothing. Berger only got away with this twice before archive personnel kept tabs on him, but the first trips involved as yet uncatalogued material so no one really knows what he took. But there seemed to be copies in the archive of everything they caught him with. And archival libraries dependent upon physical papers are vulnerable.
Every archive in the world suffers attacks, resulting in the theft of its records, the amending or destroying of them, and the archive has had five it knows of since Berger. Digital storage and authentication will be a great help in securing all holdings.
Berger was supposedly reviewing records for a Clinton response to the 9/11 Commission’s considerations of mistakes made leading up to the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Dean Emeritus of Boston University Law School Ronald Cass wonders if there was telling marginalia by Clinton or others on some of these documents that were not on the file copies. The Clintons seemed to have a longstanding problem with records, since the disappearance in 1994 and reappearance in 1996 of the subpoenaed Rose Law Firm files in the Clintons’ private White House quarters.
Now the National Archives is faced with Hillary Clinton’s history-making assault on government records while secretary of state, which Cass describes as fitting a pattern of “destroy, deny and corrupt the process.” (This is no doubt why Harvard just awarded her the Radcliffe Medal citing her “transformative impact on society.”)
How does David Ferriero plan to deal with this unique challenge to his institution? First, it’s not just his problem, although he must address the realities of gaps in the record and how it will affect plans for the new Obama presidential library. But will there be penalties for violating the 2014 law? Is it even possible to continue the great tradition of maintaining an authentic record center for the United States that President Franklin Roosevelt founded 83 years ago, if that law is not supported?
What’s That Building? Why This Hoffman Estates Warehouse Stores Barack Obama’s Presidential Papers By Dennis Rodkin
Mar. 14, 2019
If you drove past this suburban building, you likely wouldn’t suspect it houses the classified and non-classified documents from Barack Obama’s eight years as president.
More than 20 truckloads of papers were brought from Washington, D.C. to this shuttered Plunkett furniture store in Hoffman Estates in early 2017.
Those documents will eventually be digitized and made available to the public in a different way from past presidential libraries. The Obama Presidential Library won’t be a physical building — it’ll live on the internet.
A digital library saves the Obama Foundation some money
The facility that may come to mind when you think “Obama Presidential Library” — the one that’s proposed for a site in Jackson Park and currently in limbo because of a lawsuit — is the Barack Obama Presidential Center. If it gets built, the only library there will be a new branch of the Chicago Public Library. It’ll also be home to a museum, a forum space, and a public plaza.
In May 2017, the National Archives announced Obama’s library would be entirely digital. The physical documents that traditionally fill a presidential library would instead be digitized, and ultimately stored outside of Illinois. It’s a move that saves the Obama Foundation quite a bit of money.
When ex-presidents build their presidential libraries, they are required by law to provide an endowment to the National Archives, the agency that manages presidential libraries. Today, that endowment must equal 60 percent of the cost of the library. That means that if the Obama Presidential Center included a library, the Obama Foundation would also have to raise tens of millions more for the endowment.
Where will Obama’s papers end up for good?
The documents won’t stay in Hoffman Estates forever. Under the digitizing plan, the National Archives will get custody of all the physical papers once they’ve been put online. The unclassified documents will go to a National Archives storage facility near Kansas City, Mo. and the classified ones will go back to Washington, D.C.
Until the digitizing work begins, the documents will stay in Hoffman Estates behind the the small security gate installed at the parking lot entrance.
Dennis Rodkin is a real estate reporter forCrain’s Chicago Business and Morning Shift’s “What’s That Building?” contributor.
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