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Many Gore Office E-mails Will Never Be Recovered

WASHINGTON — It will be impossible to restore much of the White House e-mail traffic in the office of former Vice President Gore, despite a yearlong effort in which technical experts recovered 3 million missing messages from computer tapes, recently filed court papers reveal.

The latest twist in one of the long-running controversies of the Clinton administration was disclosed in a computer contractor's three-page declaration filed in a lawsuit in federal court.

Because of a computer glitch that wasn't publicly revealed until the final year of Clinton's presidency, the White House never reviewed many of its computer messages to see if they should be turned over in criminal probes and congressional inquiries of campaign fund-raising, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Whitewater and other matters.

The April 6 declaration by a technician from Vistronix Corp. says that due to unspecified problems the computer contractor could not extract e-mails from 189 computer backup tapes.

Sixty-three of the "problem'' tapes _ fully a third of them _ were from Gore's office.

The 189 tapes represented only 5 percent of all the tapes used in reconstructing e-mails in the past year.

Efforts to reach Gore's spokeswoman Wednesday night were not successful.

The Justice Department campaign fund-raising task force, which launched an investigation of possible obstruction in connection with the missing e-mails last year, declined to comment Wednesday night on the status of the probe.

The court papers also showed that the universe of messages that was never properly archived and therefore was never searched to see if they were relevant to various investigations is far more vast than the Clinton administration ever suggested.

The reconstructed database "currently includes 3,075,513 unique non-duplicative e-mails, out of more than 2.9 billion processed from the relevant tape population,'' the declaration states. Computer contractors did recover many of the messages from Gore's office and a batch of them was turned over to investigators last year at the Justice Department when contractors were only partly through the reconstruction.

The Gore campaign released those e-mails publicly, saying they contained ``nothing of significance,'' while the Bush campaign said the messages called Gore's credibility into question in regard to campaign fund raising. Some of the messages related to Gore's attendance at a fund-raising event at a Buddhist temple in California. Gore said he didn't realize the event was a fund-raiser.

The e-mails created by hundreds of staffers at the Clinton White House are in the custody of the National Archives, and the White House Office of Administration in the Bush administration is overseeing the effort to reconstruct the material.

The contractor's declaration was filed in a case brought by Judicial Watch, which sued the Clinton administration repeatedly on a variety of issues. The e-mail issue arose in the group's class-action lawsuit over the Clinton White House's gathering of FBI background files of appointees from the Reagan and Bush administrations.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said the government so far has turned over just one e-mail in the group's lawsuit.

-- Anonymous, April 19, 2001