White House claims e-mail on fired U.S. Attorneys was deleted

Computerworld UK - Officials in the Bush administration said Wednesday that an unknown number of e-mails at the center of a political fight over the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys have been deleted.

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said that some officials may have used Republican National Committee (RNC) e-mail accounts to discuss official government business.

Democrats in Congress have been pressing for details of the GOP e-mail accounts used by around 20 White House officials as part of a probe into the firing of the U.S. Attorneys. They are seeking to prove that the sackings were political.

But Stanzel said some of the e-mails may have been lost because the RNC has a policy of deleting e-mails from its accounts approximately once a month; e-mails from nonpolitical White House accounts are automatically archived.

"Some official e-mails have potentially been lost, and that is a mistake the White House is aggressively working to correct," Stanzel said. He added that the possibility that some e-mail related to the firings might have been deleted "can't be ruled out."

Martin Baldock, operations director at Kroll Ontrack Legal Technologies, said IT corporate managers could learn from the White House's experience. Businesses "certainly should have a policy" governing the use of employees' own e-mail accounts -- including Webmail services such as Microsoft's Hotmail or Google's Gmail -- at work. "The question mark is over people using the [RNC] system for government business. That's a policy thing rather than an IT thing."

He added: "There is a backup issue here about the way deleted e-mails are deleted." In many organizations, "backups are done more for business continuity than for an investigation in the future. But in very sensitive or regulated industries, many of our clients are now looking at proper ways of archiving and indexing e-mails. There are modern systems that will extract from Outlook or whatever, archive it, store it and allow you to retrieve it instantly."

Such systems were safer than relying on archives made by employees with their e-mail clients because they could be configured to capture all e-mail -- even when it was deleted on local hard drives.