Do I even need to ask if they disposed of the old hard drives in compliance with federal environmental laws?

While discussing the controversy over millions of missing White House emails from 2003 to 2005, the Bush administration disclosed to a federal court on Friday that old White House hard drives containing the information were destroyed. In a sworn declaration filed with US Magistrate Judge John Facciola, the White House said, “When workstations are at the end of their lifecycle and retired … the hard drives are generally sent offsite to another government entity for physical destruction.”

This declaration claimed that it has been the goal of the White House to replace one-third of its workstations every year in the President’s office, and that not all of the data on old hard drives is moved to new hard drives. The revelation of this White House “refresh program” was made to convince the federal magistrate of the futility in undertaking a court proposed email recovery plan.

The White House disclosed in January that it taped over its computer backup tapes before October 2003. Judge Facciola expressed concern, as two private groups suing the White House allege, that a large volume of archived emails may be missing from White House computer servers. Facciola proposed going to individual White House computers to get the information, but court papers filed Friday state that such a retrieval program would be costly and time-consuming.

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