A Goodbye to Bush and His E-mail Records

When George W. Bush came to power, he removed the White House e-mail archiving system that Bill Clinton's administration had previously installed. For eight years, there has been little or no record of e-mail correspondence in the Presidential Office. As a result, the National Security Archive is very concerned because of the apparent violation of the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act.

The President is supposed to turn over these records by January 20, 2009. Meredith Fuchs from the National Security Archive said recently in an interview with Nationaljournal.com that if he does not turn over the e-mail records it will be unprecedented. "He would be treating them as his own personal records and not as records of the American public," she says. "That's a really troubling possibility."

The courts have advised the Bush Administration that, in the absence of an archive, these e-mails must be recovered from back-up tapes, an arduous and time-consuming project. Even if there was enough will to do this at a time when the Administration is packing up its stuff and heading out of Dodge, there isn't enough time...nowhere near enough time!

It will now be interesting to see if President-elect Obama takes a different approach to e-mail records during his term.