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Indeed, the Republicans don't have a monopoly on email archiving problems.
Anyone remember all the emails pertaining to Monica Lewinsky and questionable campaign donations that went AWOL during the Clinton-Gore years? In fact, the Bush administration inherited some of the previous administration's email problems.
In 1994, the Clinton-Gore administration put up the first White House Web site and installed an archiving system called Automated Records Management System (ARMS). ARMS was really a set of systems that was developed to meet a court mandate for the White House to preserve emails under the FDA. At the time, ARMS was implemented, no commercial off-the-shelf system to support email records management existed in the marketplace. Consequently, ARMS was by necessity a custom system.
To design, build and maintain the e-mail and archiving system the White House hired Planning Research Corp. (PRC), a software company that worked largely for the military and government and had held the White House computer contract for 22 years, spanning five presidents (PRC was subsequently acquired by Litton Industries). "The ARMS system was implemented using the staff, contractors, resources and technologies that were present-at-hand within EOP [Executive Office of the President] at that time," Steven McDevitt, a senior IT official in the Bush White House from September 2002 to October 2006, said in a February 21, 2008, email to Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), Chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
The Oversight Committee began an investigation into missing White House emails in 2007 and held hearings on the matter in February. A source close to the hearings says that the White House placed such tight restrictions through its lawyers on what McDevitt could testify to "that basically he could say nothing as a live witness." Thus, the written email exchange between Waxman's office and McDevitt.
McDevitt was not part of the Clinton White House IT team at the time ARMS was introduced. In his initial role in the Bush White House as an information technology specialist and project manager, he did, however, conduct an analysis of ARMS in 2002 as part of an attempt to provide a long-term solution to support the emails records management of the EOP.
According to McDevitt and several Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports, the ARMS systems began experiencing some major hiccups soon after it was installed.
Gore, who as vice president was enthusiastically promoting what he called "the information super highway," had decided to set up his own computer system separate from that of the White House. The Office of the Vice President (OVP) used a temporary email storage system until ARMS was up and running. Thinking that the ARMS system was already in operation and that President's Office of Administration (OA) was managing backup tapes, the Office of the Vice President didn't bother to maintain a back up archive of its own after May 1993. Unfortunately for the Vice President and his staff, ARMS wasn't fully activated until July 1994. As a result, according to the GAO report, about 600 systems backup tapes needed to be restored to determine if they contained any non-archived email records. The cost of this exercise: an estimated $11.7 million.
Then, in 1996, the White House began a move to use servers instead of simply tape as part of the ARMS system.
It deployed Lotus Notes software as its email application and installed and maintained four Lotus Notes email servers, one remote server and one ARMS interface server. The latter transferred email records from the emails system to ARMS. From the outset, however, there were interface glitches between the interface server and ARMs.
The problem was that ARMS wasn't picking up data from the new server, which was named Mail2. As a consequence, thousands of email records - 10,000 plus according to the GAO report -- to and from West Wing officials including President Clinton went missing.
There were also difficulties migrating users to the new system.
The White House pointed the finger at PRC, which installed the Lotus Notes system, and replaced the contractor with Northrop Grumman.
"We had numerous problems with the email system. It was very poorly constructed and very poorly designed by a contractor prior to Northrop Grumman," Laura Crabtree Callahan, a former senior IT manager at the Clinton White House told the House Government Reform Committee, which was looking into the Clinton-Gore email problems in March 2000. Callahan, who claimed to have a Ph.D. in Computer Science, went on to become deputy CIO in the United States Department of Homeland Security in the Bush administration but was forced to resign after a Government Computer News broke the story in April 2003 that she had had obtained her advanced computer science degree from a diploma mill run out of a refurbished Motel 6 in Evanston, Wyo. CIOZone was unable to reach Callahan to comment on this story.
PRC countered that White House officials had pressured the contractor to rush the job, and argued there were as many as 50 White House IT officials tinkering with the servers - too many chefs as it were -- while PRC was implementing them. Still, PRC was off the case.
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