One of the groups suing the Bush administration over the alleged loss of millions of e-mail messages asked a federal court to hold administration officials in contempt, saying the Office of Administration’s chief information officer appeared to have knowingly submitted false, misleading and incomplete information to the court in January.
As part of ongoing litigation, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group, requested March 6 that the court order Bush administration defendants to show cause why they should not be held in civil contempt of court. CREW also asked the court to order the administration to pay some of CREW’s legal fees and to allow the group to take a deposition from the CIO as part of the discovery process.
CREW and the George Washington University’s National Security Archive are part of a consolidated lawsuit alleging that the Bush administration failed to meet legal obligations under the Presidential Records Act by not preserving millions of e-mail messages sent and received between 2003 and 2005.
CREW’s latest motion states that the answers that Theresa Payton, CIO at the Executive Office of the President’s Office of Administration, submitted to the court Jan. 15 on behalf of the administration have since been proven to be incorrect and misleading.
In January, the court asked Payton to answer questions about the White House’s backup tape system to help it determine whether to grant CREW’s request for expedited discovery.
Specifically, CREW says that during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing Feb. 26, new details emerged about a chart that White House officials presented to the committee last year that showed 473 days between 2003 and 2005 for which components of EOP had no archived e-mail messages.
That evidence cannot be reconciled with Payton’s responses in the Jan. 15 affidavit, the group said.
In written responses to questions from the committee’s chairman, Steven McDevitt, a former senior White House official who worked in the CIO’s office from September 2002 to 2006, said the chart, which he was in charge of creating, was the result of many weeks of analysis that involved more than a dozen people. He added that complete analysis was about 250 pages long and that a “high level of formality and review was performed” and independent analysis and verification were performed by a separate set of contractors.
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