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Seven times 'disinformation' turned out to be just the opposite By Aaron Kliegman
Source: https://justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/here-are-7-times-disinformation-turned-out-be-just-opposite
October 12, 2022
At the heart of the second trial to come out of Special Counsel John Durham's investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion probe is a story of disinformation.
Marc Elias, general counsel for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, testified both during a House Intelligence Committee investigation in 2017 and recently during Durham's ongoing probe that he was the one who hired the opposition research firm Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on then-candidate Donald Trump.
Fusion GPS went on to commission former MI6 agent Christopher Steele to create the infamous "Steele dossier," which purported to show collusion between Trump's campaign and the Kremlin. It contained several salacious and since-debunked claims about Trump and his alleged ties to Russia.
The federal government infamously used the now-discredited dossier to obtain a warrant to surveil former Trump 2016 campaign aide Carter Page. The Justice Department later admitted the warrant application was full of misinformation and the surveillance warrant should've never been approved.
The primary source of the Steele dossier was Igor Danchenko, a Russian analyst who's now on trial as part of Durham's investigation for allegedly lying to the FBI about his own sources for the information that he provided to Steele.
Federal prosecutors allege that Danchenko, who has pleaded not guilty, fabricated and concealed his sources in conversations with the feds. The trial began in Alexandria, Va. on Tuesday.
The case highlights how potent a weapon disinformation can be in today's political climate, where falsehoods can slip through the cracks and transform into received truth without the public noticing.
However, it works the other way as well.
Indeed, in the past few years the opposite has more often been the case: Something deemed disinformation ultimately turns out to be true. Here are seven recent examples of elites in government, Big Tech, and other positions of influence targeting various ideas as mis- or disinformation only to be proven wrong in the end as the facts come in:
1. Hunter Biden's laptop
In October 2020, the New York Post obtained emails from a laptop that President Biden's son, Hunter Biden, had abandoned at a repair shop in Delaware.
Shortly after the story was published, Facebook's policy communications director boasted the social media giant was "reducing its distribution on our platform." He added the report would be scrutinized by third-party fact checkers "to reduce the spread of misinformation."
Twitter quickly followed Facebook's lead, blocking users from posting or reading the story. The company even locked the Post's primary Twitter account, apparently because of "the lack of authoritative reporting on the origins of the materials included in the article."
Prominent mainstream media outlets either ignored the Hunter Biden story or cast doubt on its authenticity.
After the Post's story was published, 51 former intelligence officials signed a public letter dismissing the report as Russian disinformation. The laptop "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation," they wrote.
Only in recent months have government officials and the nation's most prestigious media outlets admitted the authenticity of the laptop, which revealed a trove of details that are now being used as part of a government probe into Biden's taxes and business dealings.
2. The origins of COVID-19
Experts, lawmakers, and journalists roundly dismissed the theory that COVID-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, attacking those who gave the idea credence as bigots.
New York Times reporter Apoorva Mandavilli, for example, tweeted the lab leak theory had "racist roots."
Scientific American accused former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield of promoting a conspiracy theory based on "xenophobia."
New York magazine reported how the media "dismissed" the possibility that COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese lab and "smeared" those who supported the theory.
Nina Jankowicz, who was appointed head of the Department of Homeland Security's now-defunct Disinformation Governance Board, dismissed the theory, saying it was "politically convenient" for the Trump administration to entertain the idea.
Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress resisted efforts to probe the merits of the lab leak theory.
Over the past year, however, the theory has gained widespread credibility from a range of evidence.
3. COVID-19 vaccines as a panacea
When the COVID-19 vaccines were first made available, they were billed by the media and public health professionals as mechanisms to limit transmission of the virus and ultimately end the pandemic.
Assertions questioning the efficacy of the vaccine were deemed "misinformation" by Big Tech companies and the Biden administration, which categorized many such assertions as "conspiracy theories."
Under a new California law, doctors who spread misinformation about COVID-19 could even be subject to discipline by state medical boards and risk losing their licenses.
However, a director of the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer admitted Tuesday at a hearing before the European Parliament that, at the time of its introduction, the COVID-19 vaccine had never been tested for stopping transmission of the virus, according to a video of the exchange posted by parliamentarian Rob Roos.
Citing new data, some experts argue the vaccine can have a range of adverse effects, including potential heart problems in young adults.
Dr. Harvey Risch, professor emeritus of epidemiology at Yale University, recently told the "Just the News, No Noise" television show that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has "officially backtracked on the vaccines as a method of public health and pandemic control."
4. Pelosi's Jan. 6 role and calling in the National Guard
Journalists, Democrats in Congress, and others have lambasted defenses of former President Trump's efforts to prepare for unrest ahead of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot as well as criticisms of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's handling of that fateful day as "lies," "counternarratives," "conspiracy theories," and "disinformation" spread by Republicans and Trump supporters.
However, Just the News reported FBI intelligence warning that Jan. 6 protesters might violently storm the Capitol was emailed the night before the riot to a top aide to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer but was never sent to frontline police commanders and officers.
That report came after new revelations showed the Pentagon first raised the possibility of sending National Guard troops to the Capitol four days before the Jan. 6 riot, validating former Trump administration officials' long-held claims about their efforts to provide extra security.
The Capitol Police rejected the offer of troops, according to government documents. Soon after, however, then-Chief Steven Sund decided he wanted the troops after all but was turned down by the House sergeant at arms, who reports to Pelosi.
Meanwhile, Trump had signed an order on Jan. 4 to deploy 20,000 Guardsmen to prevent any violence if requested by Congress, which turned down the request.
Just the News also revealed that Capitol Police had compiled a secret after-action review months after the Jan. 6 riot that identified sweeping intelligence and security failures by the department.
Pelosi has come under fire from Republicans for obstructing congressional efforts to investigate the security vulnerabilities exposed by the Jan. 6 Capitol breach.
5. The mistreatment of Jan. 6 defendants
The same voices dismissing the Jan. 6 "counternarrative" have also dismissed those raising concerns that Jan. 6 defendants have been targeted and mistreated for political reasons.
The Justice Department has arrested nearly 900 people for charges related to Jan. 6, imprisoning most without a trial. Several have said the FBI, Justice Department, and federal prison officials under the Biden administration violated their civil and constitutional rights. The vast majority weren't accused of carrying a weapon, assaulting law enforcement, or destroying property. Many didn't even enter the Capitol building.
6. Irregularities in the 2020 election
Big Tech and the Biden administration have infamously suppressed and castigated claims of irregularities in the 2020 presidential election.
For example, whistleblower documents recently released by Republican Sens. Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Chuck Grassley (Iowa) showed government officials writing that disinformation threatens homeland security, especially "conspiracy theories about the validity and security of elections" and "disinformation related to the origins and effects of COVID-19 vaccines or the efficacy of masks."
In February, the Department of Homeland Security put out a "National Terrorism Advisory Bulletin" discussing how "conspiracy theories," "misleading narratives," and "and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information" can fuel foreign and domestic terrorism. It cited "false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19" online as "key factors contributing to the current heightened threat environment."
Nonetheless, Just the News has reported on numerous examples of confirmed illegalities and irregularities in the 2020 election.
7. Critical race theory in schools
Critical race theory (CRT) argues racism is entrenched in all systems of American society and all disparities between the races indicate racial discrimination. The media and proponents of CRT have argued its critics are pushing misinformation, portraying the theory as being more prevalent than it actually is.
Last year, for example, Jankowicz referred to opponents of CRT as "disinformers," accusing them of peddling disinformation to stoke anger and make money off the uproar.
But parents have been vocally protesting the presence of CRT in their schools.
The National School Boards Association sent a letter to Biden asking his administration to investigate threats against public school officials. In the letter, the NSBA specifically referred to parents who protested the teaching of CRT in the classroom, suggesting such actions should be classified as "domestic terrorism."
The NSBA requested that the Justice and Homeland Security departments probe and prosecute these "crimes" under "the Patriot Act in regards to domestic terrorism."
Less than a week later, Attorney General Merrick Garland sent out a memo warning that the Justice Department is "committed to using its authority and resources to discourage" the "threats" described by the NSBA, "identify them when they occur, and prosecute them when appropriate."
The memo directed the FBI to work with each U.S. Attorney to convene meetings nationwide to discuss strategies for addressing these threats. Garland also mentioned his intent to "launch a series of additional efforts in the coming days" which, according to the Justice Department, would "determine how federal enforcement tools can be used to prosecute these crimes."
The NSBA later apologized for the letter after receiving backlash for comparing parent protests to domestic terrorism. However, subsequent reports indicated coordination between the NSBA and the Biden administration on the former's letter and Garland's subsequent memo.
Evidence has shown school districts teaching the ideas of CRT as part of the curriculum, even if they don't refer to CRT by name.
The Brief: It Was Okay For Bill Clinton To Keep Presidential Records, But Not Trump? By Gregg Jarrett
Source: https://thegreggjarrett.com/the-brief-it-was-okay-for-bill-clinton-to-keep-presidential-records-but-not-trump
September 28, 2022
A former president can keep whatever presidential records he wants and the government has no authority to seize them. Period.
That was the Department of Justice’s legal opinion a decade ago. It was a conclusion shared by both the National Archives and a U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. On that basis, ex-president Bill Clinton was allowed to maintain custody of whatever he wanted, including allegedly classified audio tapes that he stored in his home.
Fast forward to August 8, 2022 when Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered a team of FBI agents to raid and forcibly seize presidential records from the home and office of former President Donald Trump. Garland did it because it was Trump, not Clinton. It was purely political and contrary to the established policy of the DOJ, the controlling law under the Presidential Records Act, and the earlier federal court decision.
The 2012 case arose when the organization Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit seeking Clinton’s documents pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act. Litigation ensued to pressure the National Archives into retrieving the materials. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that control over presidential records rests squarely in the hands of a former president:
“The National Archives does not have the authority to designate materials as ‘presidential records.’ It lacks any right, duty, or means to seize control of them.”
The judge adopted the very argument made in court by the Justice Department:
“(Seizing the records) is an ‘extraordinary request’ that is ‘unfounded, contrary to the Presidential Records Act’s express terms, and contrary to the traditional principles of administrative law’.”
So, there you have it. Garland defied both the DOJ’s own legal interpretation of the law and previous court precedent to target Trump in advance of an important national election. His flagrant abuse of power bears the unmistakable stench of partisan politics, which has infected the attorney general’s corrupt tenure from the outset.
The FBI did not raid Clinton’s home to reclaim records. Nor did the FBI raid former president Barack Obama’s unsecured warehouse where he stored classified documents for the better part of two years. Lawless raids only happen to Republicans.
The Clinton case is instructive on several levels.
First, not only does it establish the right of a former president to designate what constitutes presidential records, but it also grants him the right under law to maintain control over what he deems to be personal records accrued during his term in office. Second, the case also recognizes the sole discretion of a president to segregate and dispose of records.
Finally, Judge Jackson’s opinion reinforces the constraints on the National Archives and the Justice Department. Their ability to retrieve documents is limited to a civil action, not criminal seizure.
Thus, in the Trump dispute, the proper remedy was for Garland to file a motion to compel enforcement of the civil subpoena seeking records. Instead, he chose to ignore the Presidential Records Act and raid Trump’s home under the guise of criminal statutes that have no application. He snookered a magistrate into signing an overly broad general search warrant that is strictly prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.
Garland and the National Archives are contradicting themselves. They assert that Trump has no right to the presidential records. But when Bill Clinton did the same thing, it was perfectly okay. He can keep them. No raid, no crime, no national security concerns. Move along…nothing to see here. If Garland is foolish enough to indict Trump, I look forward to watching how he’ll twist himself into a pretzel trying to explain the government’s hypocrisy.
All along, the attorney general has claimed —without real evidence— that the former president harbored still-classified documents in his possession. Trump insists he declassified the records before he left office. Media pundits who know next to nothing about the law have mocked the former president’s statements. Naturally, they are wrong.
This invites the question…what is the process for declassifying records? For a sitting president, there is no firm protocol. He has unfettered authority and latitude to declassify anything and may do so at will. His power derives from Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution that identifies the President as Commander In Chief. Typically, presidents follow an informal process of notifying relevant departments that may be affected. But this is neither imperative nor mandatory.
In declassifying, the president can provide a reason or no reason at all. He might memorialize his act in writing if he so desires, but it is not required by any law, rule, or regulation. Indeed, he need not tell anyone. In plain terms, he can simply do it. Agencies and government officials can complain all they want that the president is “jeopardizing national security,” but they have no recourse and cannot override or countermand his decision.
If Trump declassified the documents in question, then this entire controversy is about custody of presidential papers under the meaning of the Presidential Records Act. As the Clinton case underscores, these kinds of disputes belong in civil court. But Garland and the FBI took a different course. Why? The answer should be obvious to any reasonable observer.
This was always about politics, not national security. The latter was simply a convenient pretext. The true intent was to bludgeon Republicans politically with the cudgel of a raid and the corresponding threat of a criminal indictment that was guaranteed to gin up the Trump-hating media into a frenzy right before an election.
The FBI has served as witting accessories to Garland’s machinations. They have weaponized their immense powers to persecute political adversaries. President Joe Biden has created the equivalent of a secret police state. The litmus test for thuggery is your party affiliation. It’s not just Donald Trump, the FBI and DOJ want to crush all political opposition. If you dare to protest policies or disagree with the Biden agenda, you can expect a heavy knock on the door. Or maybe they won’t knock at all.
Recently, nearly two dozen whistleblowers within the FBI stepped forward to members of congress exposing how the bureau has been running a protection racket for the Bidens, hiding incriminating evidence of Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling schemes, halting the criminal investigation, and spreading lies about Russian “disinformation.” But that’s not all.
The whistleblowers have offered detailed evidence of how the FBI spies on law-abiding Americans to help advance a political agenda. They manipulate crime statistics and inflate the number of domestic terrorism cases. They conduct raids without legal justification by lying to judges. SWAT teams are being misused to make misdemeanor arrests. Overzealous agents are banging on the doors of people who were nowhere near the nation’s Capitol on January 6th.
Those honorable whistleblowers who have had the courage to come forward are being punished by top brass at the FBI, in direct violation of laws forbidding retaliation. Recently, Merrick Garland sent out a department-wide directive ordering agents never to speak with members of congress. Garland’s missive is illegal and violates the Whistleblower Protection Act —not that he cares.
FBI Director Christopher Wray has done nothing to cleanup his cesspool of an agency. To the contrary, he covers up acts of malfeasance and misfeasance while enabling Garland’s authoritarian lawlessness. Concerned parents who complain at school board meetings are treated as “domestic terrorists” and investigated by the FBI. Escalating attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers are largely ignored with zero arrests. Both the FBI and DOJ look the other way when demonstrators shout threats at conservative Supreme Court Justices outside their homes, in direct violation of the law.
None of this is surprising given the shameful record of the FBI. Under Wray’s predecessor James Comey, the agency lied to the FISA court to obtain warrants to spy on Trump’s campaign, doctored evidence against him, and used a phony “dossier” as the basis for a corrupted “collusion” investigation of the president that they knew was utterly baseless. Sadly, this is what our once vaunted law enforcement agency has become —a powerful political cabal that targets innocent Americans and routinely violates their civil rights.
Both Wray and Garland have squandered trust in government. They should be sacked or impeached. Reform is desperately needed.
National Archives loses hard drive with Clinton era records By Mike M. Ahlers and Elaine Quijano
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/20/lost.hard.drive.clinton/index.html#
May 20, 2009
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The National Archives -- a repository of important government documents, including the U.S. Constitution -- has lost a computer hard drive containing large volumes of Clinton administration records, including the names, phone numbers and Social Security numbers of White House staff members and visitors.
Officials at the Archives say they don't know how many confidential records are on the hard drive. But congressional aides briefed on the matter say it contains "more than 100,000" Social Security numbers, including one belonging to a daughter of then-Vice President Al Gore. It also contains Secret Service and White House operating procedures, the staffers said they were told.
The hard drive was last seen in the National Archive's complex in College Park, Maryland, sometime between October of last year and the first week of February. It was discovered missing in late March, prompting a thorough search for the small, 2.5 pound device, the Archives said. When it could not be located, the inspector general's office opened a criminal investigation.
On Wednesday, the Archives announced a $50,000 reward for information leading to its return.
The Archives said no national security information is on the hard drive, nor any original documents. But they said it does contain "personally identifiable information," and they take the loss "very seriously."
U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California, whose staff was briefed on the matter, said the House will hold a hearing Thursday on the incident.
"If they [the National Archives' staff] can't handle a hard drive that may be sensitive properly, we need to ask the question, will they handle the most secret materials properly?" Issa said.
The Archives Wednesday gave the following account of the disappearance:
Last October, the hard drive was moved from a "secure" storage area to a workspace where it was being used for routine recopying to ensure preservation of the records. But work was halted last year because archivists "wanted to investigate using automated tools to generate inspection reports."
Staffers were moved to other projects until an automated tool was found in mid-March -- that's when they found the hard drive was missing.
The device is described as a two terabyte Western Digital MY BOOK external hard drive, measuring 6.5 x 2.1 x 5.4 inches.
More than 110 4-millimeter tape cartridges were copied onto the hard drive. The records included records from the Clinton Administration Executive Office of the President.
The archives said no original records have been lost, and the Archives has a backup hard drive that will enable them to determine what information is on the missing device.
The inspector general said at least 100 people had access to the area where the hard drive was left unsecured, and that janitors, visitors and others also passed through the area.
The Archives said it is reviewing the data on a copy of the missing hard drive and compiling a list of people whose personal information may be compromised. It will notify individuals of the potential breach and will provide them with a year of credit monitoring, the Archives said.
"Because of the extremely large volume of data on the drive, we do not know yet the number of individuals whose privacy has been affected," the Archives said Wednesday. "As individuals are identified, they will be notified."
The Archives also said it has taken steps to improve security, including both physical control of records and the treatment of personal information.
The George W. Bush White House 'Lost' 22 Million Emails By Nina Burleigh
Source: https://www.newsweek.com/2016/09/23/george-w-bush-white-house-lost-22-million-emails-497373.html
September 12, 2016
Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
For 18 months, Republican strategists, political pundits, reporters and Americans who follow them have been pursuing Hillary Clinton's personal email habits, and no evidence of a crime has been found. But now they at least have the skills and interest to focus on a much larger and deeper email conspiracy, one involving war, lies, a private server run by the Republican Party and contempt of Congress citations—all of it still unsolved and unpunished.
Clinton's email habits look positively transparent when compared with the subpoena-dodging, email-hiding, private-server-using George W. Bush administration. Between 2003 and 2009, the Bush White House "lost" 22 million emails. This correspondence included millions of emails written during the darkest period in America's recent history, when the Bush administration was ginning up support for what turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq with false claims that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and, later, when it was firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons.
Like Clinton, the Bush White House used a private email server—its was owned by the Republican National Committee. And the Bush administration failed to store its emails, as required by law, and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of those emails. "It's about as amazing a double standard as you can get," says Eric Boehlert, who works with the pro-Clinton group Media Matters. "If you look at the Bush emails, he was a sitting president, and 95 percent of his chief advisers' emails were on a private email system set up by the RNC. Imagine if for the last year and a half we had been talking about Hillary Clinton's emails set up on a private DNC server?"
Smith Collection/Gado/Getty
Most troubling, researchers found a suspicious pattern in the White House email system blackouts, including periods when there were no emails available from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. "That the vice president's office, widely characterized as the most powerful vice president in history, should have no archived emails in its accounts for scores of days—especially days when there was discussion of whether to invade Iraq—beggared the imagination," says Thomas Blanton, director of the Washington-based National Security Archive. The NSA (not to be confused with the National Security Agency, the federal surveillance organization) is a nonprofit devoted to obtaining and declassifying national security documents and is one of the key players in the effort to recover the supposedly lost Bush White House emails.
The media paid some attention to the Bush email chicanery but spent considerably less ink and airtime than has been devoted to Clinton's digital communications in the past 18 months. According to the Boston social media analytics firm Crimson Hexagon, which ran a study for Newsweek, there have been 560,397 articles mentioning Clinton's emails between March 2015 and September 1, 2016.
In 1978, Congress passed the Presidential Records Act (PRA), which mandated that all presidential and vice presidential records created after January 20, 1981, be preserved and that the public, not the president, owned the records. The following year, the Reagan administration installed the White House's rudimentary first email system.
Despite the PRA, neither the Reagan nor the George H.W. Bush administration maintained email records, even as the number of White House emails began growing exponentially. (The Bush administration would produce around 200 million.) In 1989, a federal lawsuit to force the White House to comply with the PRA was filed by several groups, including the National Security Archive, which at the time was mostly interested in unearthing the secret history of the Cold War. The suit sparked a last-minute court order, issued in the waning hours of the first Bush presidency, that prevented 6,000 White House email backup tapes from being erased.
When Bill Clinton moved into the White House, his lawyers supported the elder Bush in his effort to uphold a side deal he'd cut with the National Archives and Records Administration to allow him to treat his White House emails as personal. At the time, George Stephanopoulos—then the White House communications director—defended the resistance, saying his boss, like Bush, didn't want subsequent, and potentially unfriendly, administrations rooting around in old emails.
The Clinton White House eventually settled the suit, and White House aide John Podesta—now Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman—even invited members of the National Security Archive into the White House to demonstrate how the new system worked. If anyone tried to delete an email, a message would pop up on screen indicating that to do so would be in violation of the PRA.
"We were happy with that," recalls Blanton, who edited a book on the Reagan-Bush email evasion, White House E-Mail: The Top Secret Messages the Reagan/Bush White House Tried to Destroy.
Eight years later, in 2003, a whistleblower told the National Security Archive that the George W. Bush White House was no longer saving its emails. The Archive and another watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (which had represented outed CIA agent Valerie Plame in her case against the Bush administration), refiled their original lawsuit.
The plaintiffs soon discovered that Bush aides had simply shut down the Clinton automatic email archive, and they identified the start date of the lost emails as January 1, 2003. The White House claimed it had switched to a new server and in the process was unable to maintain an archive—a claim that many found dubious.
Bush administration emails could have aided a special prosecutor's investigation into a White House effort to discredit a diplomat who disagreed with the administration's fabricated Iraq WMD evidence by outing his CIA agent wife, Plame. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who was brought in to investigate that case, said in 2006 that he believed some potentially relevant emails sent by aides in Cheney's office were in the administration's system but he couldn't get them.
Larry Downing/Reuters
The supposedly lost emails also prevented Congress from fully investigating, in 2007, the politically motivated firing of nine U.S. attorneys. When the Democrat-led Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed related emails, Bush's attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez, said many were inaccessible or lost on a nongovernmental private server run by the RNC and called gwb43.com. The White House, meanwhile, officially refused to comply with the congressional subpoena.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) called the president's actions "Nixonian stonewalling" and at one point took to the floor in exasperation and shouted, "They say they have not been preserved. I don't believe that!" His House counterpart, Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), said Bush's assertion of executive privilege was unprecedented and displayed "an appalling disregard for the right of the people to know what is going on in their government."
In court in May 2008, administration lawyers contended that the White House had lost three months' worth of email backups from the initial days of the Iraq War. Bush aides thus evaded a court-ordered deadline to describe the contents of digital backup believed to contain emails deleted in 2003 between March—when the U.S. invaded Iraq—and September. They also refused to give the NSA nonprofit any emails relating to the Iraq War, despite the PRA, blaming a system upgrade that had deleted up to 5 million emails. The plaintiffs eventually contended that the Bush administration knew about the problem in 2005 but did nothing to fix it.
Eventually, the Bush White House admitted it had lost 22 million emails, not 5 million. Then, in December 2009—well into Barack Obama's administration—the White House said it found 22 million emails, dated between 2003 and 2005, that it claimed had been mislabeled. That cache was given to the National Archives, and it and other plaintiffs agreed, on December 14, 2009, to settle their lawsuit. But the emails have not yet been made available to the public.
The Senate Judiciary Committee was operating on a different track but having no more luck. In a bipartisan vote in 2008, the committee found White House aides Karl Rove and Joshua Bolten in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with subpoenas in the investigation of the fired U.S. attorneys. The penalties for contempt are fines and possible jail time, but no punishment was ever handed down because a D.C. federal appeals court stayed the Senate's ruling in October 2008, while the White House appealed. Rove's lawyer claimed Rove did not "intentionally delete" any emails but was only conducting "the type of routine deletions people make to keep their inboxes orderly," according to the Associated Press.
By then, Obama was weeks away from winning the election, so the Bush administration basically ran out the clock. And neither the Obama administration nor the Senate committee pursued the matter.
The committee's final report on the matter was blunt: "[T]his subversion of the justice system has included lying, misleading, stonewalling and ignoring the Congress in our attempts to find out precisely what happened. The reasons given for these firings were contrived as part of a cover-up, and the stonewalling by the White House is part and parcel of that same effort."
At the time, some journalists and editorialists complained about a lack of transparency on the White House's part, but The Washington Post, in an editorial, accepted the White House explanation that the emails could have been lost due to flawed IT systems.
The mystery of what was in the missing Bush emails and why they went missing is still years away from being solved—if ever. The National Archives now has 220 million emails from the Bush White House, and there is a long backlog of Freedom of Information Act requests already. But not all of the emails will be available to the public until 2021, when the presidential security restrictions elapse. Even then, with currently available archiving and sorting methods, researchers still have years of work to figure out whether Cheney deleted days' worth of emails around the time of the WMD propaganda campaign that led to war, Blanton says.
"To your question of what's in there—we don't know," he says. "There was not a commitment at the top for saving it all. Now was that resistance motivated by political reasons? Or was it 'We gotta save money'?"
Tim Sloan/Reuters
Like Leahy, Blanton has doubts that the emails were ever truly "lost," given that every email exists in two places, with the sender and with the recipient. But unlike watchdog group Judicial Watch, which has been relentless about forcing the State Department to publicly release Hillary Clinton's emails, Blanton and his fellow researchers have decided not to press their fight for the release of the Bush emails.
Blanton says he has no idea whether the Bush email record will be found intact after 2021, when his group will be allowed to do a systematic search and recovery process in the National Archives. "Did they find all of them? We don't know," he says. "Our hope is that by that time, the government and the National Archives will have much better technology and tools with which to sift and sort that kind of volume."
Blanton says he's not expecting that kind of upgrade, though. "Their entire budget is less than the cost of a single Marine One helicopter," he says. "It's an underfunded orphan."
Meanwhile, the episode has been nearly forgotten by almost everyone but the litigants. A source involved with the stymied congressional investigation recalled the period as "an intense time," but the Obama administration didn't encourage any follow-up, devoting its political capital to dealing with the crashing economy rather than investigating the murky doings that took place under his predecessor. Since then, no major media outlet has devoted significant—or, really, any—resources to obtaining the emails, or to finding out what was in them, or what, exactly, the Bush administration was hiding (or losing).
Barack Obama Has Missing Records. When Will the FBI Ransack His House? By Matt Vespa
Source: https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2022/08/11/when-will-the-fbi-raid-obamas-home-over-his-missing-records-n2611588
August 11, 2022
If the Federal Bureau of Investigation is going to be roving the countryside looking for presidential documents, then Barack Obama’s residence must be next. By now, you all know about the federal raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, executed under the pretense of document retrieval. The FBI deployed many agents to find documents for the National Archives. The political class doesn’t want Trump to run again, and they used their allies at the Department of Justice to deliver that warning. Agents broke into the safe, manhandled Melania Trump’s clothing, and absconded with boxes of supposed documents meant for preservation, but reportedly barred Trump’s lawyers from overseeing the search.
All of this over some reported missing records—it’s just waggish that the feds would think we, the American people, would buy this narrative. I don’t think even the staunchest Trump hater even believes this line, with their main criticism being just that—the cover story isn’t plausible. It’s not, but let’s have some fun with this game. If federal agents are roving nationwide to ensure the National Archives is content, then Obama’s house must be ransacked next because the issue tracking all his documents stems back to 2018. Troves of Obama files went missing—vanished into the ether. Real Clear Politics around this time reported on the lost files, with Hillary Clinton’s email fiasco via her private homebrew server again being mentioned (via RCP):
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.”
Construction for the Obama library began last year, but before its opening, maybe we should check if he doesn’t have records tucked away at his Martha’s Vineyard estate. I mean, the man wanted over 10,000 documents kept under seal. Boxes of papers from Mar-a-Lago were already returned to the National Archives last February, and the feds still came down on Trump looking for anything to keep the Russian collusion myth alive—I mean, those precious presidential papers that just needed an escort by the Hoover brigade. It’s a circus. Obama's residences should be raided when the GOP regains executive control if we’re prying open safes of former presidents based on political bias. We just must ensure that the Presidential Records Act is being honored. It’s patriotism. That’s what some people are telling me.
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