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The need for installing an effective archival system had become abundantly clear as ECRMs was being completed. In October 2005 an Office of Administration team, which was headed by McDevitt and included 14 White House officials and contractor personnel, discovered that some emails had not been archived properly. A detailed analysis subsequently showed that, in fact, between January 3, 2003 and July 28, 2005, approximately 5 million emails were missing for one or more EOP components, based on the normal email traffic patterns among the 1,700 of so users of the White House system. Moreover, the analysis identified over 700 days during that period in which Executive Office email traffic was unusually low, and 473 days in which there were virtually no Executive Office emails preserved. The analysis also showed a complete absence of emails stored for the President's office for 12 days and for Vice President Cheney's office for 16 days.
White House Counsel Harriet Miers was provided a detailed briefing of this analysis and a plan of action to recover the missing email was developed, according to a report by CREW, the non-profit activist group in Washington, titled "Without a Trace: The Story Behind the Missing White House E-Mails and the Violations of the Presidential Records Act."
The White House, however, had remained mum about this massive black hole in its journaling system. Consequently, the issue didn't become problematic until January 2006 when Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald tried to determine what role, if any, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, had played in the outing of Valerie Plume as a CIA operative. After Fitzgerald requested that all relevant email from the White House be turned over to his office, he discovered, as he noted in a January 23, 2006, letter to Libby's attorney, "that not all email of the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through normal archiving process on the White House computer system."
In fact, according to documents later obtained by the Oversight Committee, the journaling archive contained not a single email from the OVP from September 30, 2003, to October 6, 2003, which coincided exactly with the opening days of the Justice Department's investigation of the Plame affair. The OVP backup tapes also contained no PST files or journalized emails emanating from or to Cheney's office during that period.
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