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Payton's decision to drop ECRMS caught many by surprise and raised considerable concern.
Officials from NARA had participated in the development of requirements from ECRMS and had a proprietary interest in the system since NARA was ultimately responsible for retaining all documents and materials created by the Bush White House. According to NARA records of meetings with Payton, NARA noted that "even if it did take ECRMS 18 months to ingest the existing backlog of messages, the process would still be completed before Bush left office."
Carlos Solari seemed taken back by Payton's decision. In his interview with Oversight Committee staff members he stated he "absolutely" believed that ECRMS would be implemented, thought the "system got finished" and was "puzzled" as to why ECRMS had been rejected.
And several of those involved with ECRMS complained that Payton had unfairly characterized the system as a legacy - i.e. wagon wheel - technology and used that as an excuse to deep-six the system
McDevitt, who had put in three years supervising ECRMS's development, was so upset by Payton's decision that he cited it as one reason he resigned from his job in October 2006, according to a letter he later wrote Rep. Waxman.
More alarming to some was that in lieu of going with ECRMS, or bringing any one of numerous off-the-shelf, real time archival storage and retrieval systems that Bill Tolson notes had been available since 2000, Payton chose to do nothing - that is, stick with the journaling process and PST files that had been installed strictly as a temporary solution in 2002.
This decision drew fire from a number of sources including The National Security Archive, an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University in Washington. "This just didn't make any sense," notes Meredith Fuchs, the organization's general counsel. "Even if an email archival system [such as ECRMS], is not completely adequate, it's better than having no real archival system at all."
When Payton began her tenure as White House CIO, it was left to her ultimately to account for the emails. This she did in testifying before the Committee on January 16, 2008, explaining that, despite the "2005 report" from McDevitt's team, the Grand Canyon size gap in the EOP archive system might simply be a mirage, the result of a miscalculation rather than a systemic systems failing. She said:
"The Committee has expressed concerns about allegations that EOP emails were not properly archived between 2003 and 2005. I am aware of a chart created by OCIO staff in late 2005 to early 2006 that identifies dates and EOP components for which email counts were thought to be low or non-existent during the 2003-2005 time period. Since that time, the OCRO (Office of Chief Researcher) staff came to have reservations about the tool used to collect the data in the chart.
"OCIO thus hired a contractor to perform a comprehensive re-inventory of existing archived messages by component and date. This re-inventory effort is nearly complete. OCIO has also begun an analysis of potential anomalies. Once both the re-inventory and analysis are complete, we will have a separate team do a quality assurance review to confirm the accuracy of the results. This process of re-inventory, analysis, and quality assurance is complex, labor intensive, and time-consuming. At this stage, OCRO does not know if any emails were not properly preserved."
In other words, maybe, just maybe - it would be a long time before anyone knew for sure - every last one of those emails could still be in the archives.
Even though White House spokeswoman Dana Perino had conceded on April 17, 2007, that, "I wouldn't rule out that there were a potential 5 million emails lost," Payton's testimony gave the EOP a new story to put out to the press. On January 17, 2008, the day after Payton testified, White House Press Secretary Tony Fratto stated at a press briefing: "I think to the best of what all the analysis we've been able to do, we have absolutely no reason to believe that any emails are missing; there's no evidence of that….We have not been able to note the absence of anything in our database."
In response, Representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the Oversight Committee said: "At today's White House press briefing, Deputy Press Secretary Tony Fratto was asked about allegations that White House e-mails have been lost from White House servers. He stated in response: 'We have absolutely no reason to believe that any e-mails are missing." This statement is contrary to information that the White House provided to the Committee staff in a briefing on September 19, 2007. At this briefing, the White House showed staff a chart indicating that there were 473 days for which various entities in the Executive Office of the President had no archived e-mails."
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